


ANTITHESIS / SYNTHESIS

by pyrophane



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Actually Less Enemies More People With Generally Complicated Issues, Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, And Some Tender Feelings, Canon-Typical Violence, Emphasis On The Ghost, Enemies to Lovers, Ghost Drifting, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2020-11-23 06:20:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20887523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyrophane/pseuds/pyrophane
Summary: What’s the terminal velocity of a body falling through water three metres below the surface of the ocean?The Drift never lets anyone go.





	ANTITHESIS / SYNTHESIS

**Author's Note:**

  * For [citadis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/citadis/gifts), [hypercrite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypercrite/gifts).

> dear aislinn and gin: sorry i didn't finish this in time for either of your birthdays but [blows a kiss across the ocean] this one's for you guys!! thank you for everything including making me nahyuckist in the first place. love you both <3 <3 <3
> 
> > i relocated the nagasaki shatterdome to shanghai for plot convenience please don't think too hard about the pacrim side of the lore  
> there are a bunch of ambiguous past and background relationships that you're welcome to read in a platonic or romantic light  
> huge thank you to: noura for the original idea and for canon reviewing + troubleshooting plot with me, len and dio for the characterisation help, dia for the canon check + beta work + general handholding, and also tl for listening to me talk about this fic for more than a year ;__;  
> see end notes for further content warnings  
> optional playlist [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4FnLnrAxeOFtchvGzXyMrb?si=WB-ZiwMaRh-UoTe7xnDfdA) if you want to listen!  
> hope you enjoy!!!

In the aftermath of tangled char  
and sagefire I dreamed  
of fresh poultices, a thumbnail scraping  
oil from orange peels. I feared  
memory and what came  
to canker it.

—_Tenebrae_, Shastra Deo

“Okay, enough,” Jeno says flatly, stretching out a socked foot to halt Jaemin’s chair mid-spin. The light from the three screens he’s monitoring scatter off the rim of his glasses and onto the polished table in fingernail crescents of silvery white. 

Jaemin lifts his eyes from the table surface back to Jeno and leans further down in his chair. “Enough what?”

“I know you actually and for real don’t have anything better to do than watch me troubleshoot jaeger hydraulics for five hours straight—”

“Hey! Can’t I just spend some quality time with my best friend—” 

“—but you’re giving me secondhand motion sickness,” Jeno finishes, looking Jaemin right in the eye. That simply isn’t fair. Jaemin should, by all rights, have a monopoly on soul-piercing gazes. 

Jaemin sighs. “They won’t let me into the Kwoon Room,” he says.

“Well, I can’t help you there.”

“Can’t you talk to med bay for me? I know Doctor Kim has a soft spot for you, he’ll say yes to anything if you ask him.” Jaemin scoots his chair closer to bat at Jeno’s shoulder. “I’m _fine_, I swear, but I won’t be for much longer if I lose my mind from having nothing to do all day.” 

“I am _not_ talking Doyoung-hyung into signing off on you before you’re ready,” Jeno says. “You realise the whole point of a break is that you do nothing? Or you could pick up a hobby.”

“I have a hobby,” Jaemin says, turning his widest, most sincere eyes on Jeno. “It’s called doing my job.”

He’s expecting Jeno to play along, mock exasperation, but instead Jeno says, with an awful kind of gentleness, “Jaemin.” Jaemin tenses. The screens behind Jeno blur the outline of his body into hazy blue-white, like water seen through glass. Jeno took him to the aquarium once, when Jaemin first arrived in Sydney, and standing in the tunnels passing underneath the water felt like dislocation from his body; it'd been strange to be on the outside of the glass looking in, rather than the other way around. Everything had been strange, then, except Jeno. “Have you gotten the rest of your evals done yet? The _non_-physical ones?”

They both know the answer to this question. “Funny you should say that,” Jaemin says.

Jeno’s mouth pulls downwards. “Are you still having trouble sleeping?”

He hasn’t slept in intervals longer than two hours for at least the past half a year. Strangely enough it’s been getting worse. For months after Scrapgun he’d slept through the entire night, whole twelve hours like an infant, until the dreams started up. “Nope,” Jaemin says.

Predictably, Jeno sees right through him. “Go see Doyoung-hyung,” he says, frowning. “Or anyone at the medical centre, but—seriously, even if it’s just for the sleeping problem.”

“Hey,” Jaemin says, shifting in his seat. “Don’t _you_ go losing sleep over me. I’m fine, I’ve been fine, you don’t have to take care of me. That’s _my_ job, hey?” Before Jeno can respond, Jaemin stands up. “I’m gonna take my lunch break, you want anything?”

The crease between Jeno’s brows doesn’t even out. “I’m good, I already ate,” he says, as if Jaemin doesn’t know the way Jeno basically goes into a fugue state when he’s got a screen in front of him, for work or for leisure. He was planning to get out of the Shatterdome and stop at Jeno’s favourite bakery anyway. It’s habitual, the process of caretaking for someone else, rather than only for himself. Jeno has always let him, after all. 

Sometimes he almost wishes Jeno wouldn’t, but the history holds steady as a bridge, a tunnel of reinforced glass and steel. If Jaemin knows exactly what Jeno needs, the reverse of that is also true: Jeno knows exactly what Jaemin needs. To give as though he’s taking. To hold on to something that won’t change. When left to the tides everything drifts apart eventually, a slow erosion of grip. He can still feel Jeno’s eyes on the back of his neck like a needle stitching up a seam as he leaves the room.

Jaemin doesn’t sleep anymore, because in his dreams it happens like this:

Scrapgun’s an ugly bastard with a club of a tail and the attitude to match. Fucker just won't stay down, has already taken out Obelisk Torment but there’s no time or space in the Drift to worry about Yiren and Xukun. It catches their shoulder joint with its tail and cleaves it right open. Their arm smashes into the ocean, white sparks fountaining out of the wound, and with the sudden lack of a counterweight the blow to their equilibrium is unrecoverable. Rise Falcon goes down, a goliath toppled. The shock jolts them out of alignment, tears the spinal clamps clean off their suits, shift from plural to singular as they hit the water.

Track in, tight focus. Renjun hauls him out of the Conn-Pod, wrestles the helmet off his head. His mouth moves but Jaemin can’t hear a word and Renjun’s face twists up. 

Scene cut. The ocean roiling, tarred over black. Everything goes under, reemerges upended, Renjun clinging onto the pod and onto Jaemin, but the water eats away at even Renjun's furious, incandescent resolve and the pod slips out of his grip. Scene cut. They hit the water again but this time they sink, submerged maybe three metres under the surface. Renjun’s hands bruising his upper arm. Force of kicking upwards. Somebody lets go.

Jaemin wasn’t actually conscious for any of it. Blacked out sometime after Rise Falcon crashed into the water, blare of system alerts and staticky desperate snatches of Jeno’s voice in his ears and Renjun somewhere he couldn’t see or feel on the other side of a severed connection, vision smearing out into red. But in his dreams he’s the one who lets go first, who drowns, who wakes up choking on phantom water, trying to excavate the long-gone flood from his lungs. Iron in his mouth. Salt stinging his eyes. 

In the end all he knows is that by some miracle he washed up on Taiwan’s shore, and Renjun didn’t. So whether the dreams are reconstruction or memory lifted from the last frayed vestiges of the Drift, he doesn’t know. He never saw it happen and so it’s still happening, the truth tilting and fracturing itself kaleidoscopically, the same thing split over the shards of a million distorted reflections. Not knowing for sure is a splinter under his nails. When he closes his eyes Renjun is always falling through water, so slowly it’s as if he isn’t falling at all, body cushioned by the perfect dark of the ocean, half in embrace. Like he’s suspended in time. Like he’ll never finish falling. Like he’ll never— 

By the time Jaemin’s back from his lunch break, the Shatterdome is alight and buzzing in a way that can only signal big news. He flags down Yuna as she’s stepping out of the Kwoon Room, and a few back-and-forth wide flashes of teeth later he has all the information he needs. In two days they’ll be hosting two new residents: a jaeger fresh from construction, and her minder, Busan’s star engineer Lee Donghyuck.

Everyone knows Lee Donghyuck at least by name, the most promising cadet to grace the academy since Lee Taemin himself, pride and joy of the Busan Shatterdome. Jaemin’s seen his stats: 97% drop rate, stellar compatibility with academy classmate Mark Lee. They’d enlisted just after Jaemin and Renjun and Jeno were transferred to Shanghai, been practically guaranteed copilot tenure as soon as they graduated; there were even rumours a new Mark V jaeger had been commissioned for them. Until two weeks out from the final simulation exam Chimaera mangled the legs of Starve Venom’s Nakamoto Yuta badly enough that he’d need years of physical therapy to ever get back into a cockpit, and Mark was roped in as a temporary substitute that turned permanent once the PPDC saw just how much synergy he had with Lee Taeyong.

It left Donghyuck as the most promising cadet to graduate the academy without a copilot. All the skills in the world don’t do you any good unless you’ve got a matched pair. Too valuable to waste, so he’d been reassigned to the engineering division of J-Tech, and that had been the last Jaemin heard of him, three years ago. 

Somehow he isn’t surprised that Donghyuck’s come back into the spotlight. Sydney has plenty of brilliant engineers of its own; the fact that Donghyuck has been sent along with his pet jaeger couldn’t more obviously be an indication that the PPDC’s decided to go copilot-hunting in the Sydney recruit pool. 

Should be fun to see. Jeno’s office is empty, so Jaemin drops off the pastry next to the keyboard after scribbling a string of kaomojis on a sticky note and heads back towards his dorm room; seniority privileges netted him a single. Sydney’s local guardian is a Mark IV, Tyrant Archfiend, and he’s only been here just over a year now but the unsettled-dust shine of excitement to the entire Shatterdome tells him it must have been ages since there last was a social shakeup of this magnitude. And it's catching—there’s a weird firecracker exhilaration bubbling up, too restless to be vertigo. It feels almost like an omen. Call it intuition, gut feeling, wind change, _something_. Maybe it’s time to get that paperwork in. Finish off his evaluations. He stops in his tracks. Spins on his heel and doubles back for the medical centre.

After he’d been discharged from the medical centre post-Scrapgun he’d started sleeping in Jeno’s room. He couldn’t even get past the threshold of his own, in those first few days, rattlesnake grip around his chest freezing his breath out the moment he touched the doorframe. His heart wouldn’t leave his throat. It ached to swallow around it.

Jeno was in the process of relocating to the Sydney Shatterdome, so Jaemin applied for a transfer too, because he was no longer interested in being in any place that didn’t also have Jeno. All the anchors he had left to the life he’d built in Shanghai pulling away and out. Cut the tether between anchor and vessel and you got one half sunk in the ocean floor and the other half tossed around on top of the waves. Spat out like a loose tooth onto Taiwan’s shores.

So he was expecting it when Marshall Guo called him into her office. He hadn’t exactly been subtle about the whole thing, practically daring someone to call him out on the misapplied coping mechanism or whatever, but he couldn’t muster up the energy to care. He stood at attention in front of Marshall Guo’s desk, because it was something his body still remembered how to do. Muscle, sinew, bone. This was how you made yourself look unbreakable even after your counterweight had crashed into the water. His shoulder twinged.

Marshall Guo looked at him steadily. “I’m approving your transfer request, but I’m putting you on mandatory medical leave,” she said. “You’ll need to pass all your evaluations again to go back on any kind of active duty. Don’t even think about setting a foot into the Kwoon Room until you’re cleared.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. 

Her gaze softened a little. “It never does any good to run,” she said. “It’ll catch up to you in the end. Trust me on this, I know what it’s like.”

“I’m not running,” Jaemin said. “I just… I can’t stay here. Everywhere I go, it’s like—”

The entire Shatterdome was steeped in memory past saturation point. If he didn’t escape it he’d be crushed under it. Water pressure was identical in all directions. Sometimes he was still there, cocooned in the liquid dark, Renjun’s fingers slipping out of his, little by little, or the other way around; there was no way to tell which direction was which. 

“I can’t stay here,” he repeated. Hands still. Posture perfect.

She regarded him for a long moment. Then she shook her head. “Well, good luck, Ranger Na,” she said. “You’re one of our best. You’ll always be welcome here.”

He’d already known then he wouldn’t be coming back. From Marshall Guo’s expression, she knew it too. 

By the time the official paperwork came through, Jeno had already flown over to Sydney, so Junhui and Zhengting saw him off at the airport. They’d been stationed at Shanghai for half a year now, but word was they’d been permanently reassigned from their Hong Kong post to Shanghai, as Rise Falcon’s replacement. It was Thousand Restrict, after all, that had come in and dealt Scrapgun the finishing blow after Obelisk Torment and Rise Falcon both proved themselves incapable. Yiren and Xukun hadn’t been discharged from the medical centre yet but part of him wondered darkly—they’d always been Renjun’s friends first and he was only the rest of it, whatever was left after Renjun was snipped out. Junhui, Zhengting, Yiren, Xukun; they’d all been Renjun’s.

Junhui reached towards Jaemin. The moment his arms went around Jaemin’s waist a memory that wasn’t his resurfaced, double vision: Junhui, years younger and laughing, lifting him off the ground, _you’re the size of a feather, didn’t you say last time you were going to catch up to me?_ Jaemin let it play through, and then he shelved it away.

“Take care of yourself, Jaemin-ah,” Zhengting said, in Korean. His hand came up to curl around Junhui’s shoulder, and almost simultaneously Junhui stepped back, like they were two halves of a single movement. There was a coal in Jaemin’s throat. Bitter like a heart.

He swallowed. Thanked them both. He must have been more tired than he thought, because almost as soon as he boarded the plane and sat down he knocked out. Nine hours later he opened his eyes in a new country and abruptly heartsickness hit him like a punch. Welcome home, he thought. 

Without breaking stride, Serim reaches over to Jaemin’s treadmill and starts button-bashing to increase his angle of inclination. “Are you going to check out the new jaeger?” 

Jaemin grits his teeth through the freshly spreading burn up his thighs. “Thought they weren’t letting anyone into the hangar yet,” he says.

“They aren’t,” she says, “but I can lend you my ID to get in! If I need it I’ll just bother Sihyeon for hers, everyone treats us like the same person anyway.”

“Because I can definitely pass as Ranger Jo Serim, globally famed left half of Tyrant Archfiend, who is also an entire head shorter than me.” 

Serim shakes out her bubblegum-pink bangs, wisps of sweaty hair falling out of her bun. “I don’t know, I think we could pass as twins,” she says, grinning at him with all her teeth. “Nobody would suspect a thing!”

She reaches for the speed controls on his machine and he swats her hands away. Serim likes to motivate via enthusiasm verging on brute force, which makes her a fun workout partner, but she would probably consider Jaemin passing out on the treadmill an exciting bonding activity.

“Would’ve worked better when my hair was still pink,” Jaemin says regretfully. His breath is starting to come shorter, those extra degrees of slope making themselves known in the strain collecting down his legs. Serim just glows at him from her own treadmill, totally composed despite the speed of her run. Ranger stamina really is something else. She needs it, to operate her half of a seven-thousand-tonne metal robot bodysuit. Jaemin doesn’t. The only weight on his shoulders is habit.

After a set of cooldown stretches he takes Serim up on her offer anyway. He’s curious, he can’t help it. Thus armed with active Ranger clearance he makes his way down to the hangar, where the new jaeger arrived late last night. He taps Serim’s ID to the touchscreen pad, and her face—now that he’s thinking about it, it does look a little like his own, though that could just be confirmation bias—flashes up in monochrome blue as the doors slide open to allow him entry.

Usually there’s always a miniature crowd of technicians and engineers milling around, but today the hangar is empty, something eerie about the absolute stillness of a place he’s only ever seen shimmering with activity. His footsteps echo jarringly on the metal grating as he descends the stairs. The overhead floodlights aren’t on and the natural light pouring in from the outdoor landing pad at the other end of the hangar doesn’t quite manage to shift the gloom, so Jaemin blinks, waiting for his vision to adjust to the difference. 

When the silhouette of the new jaeger registers it’s like a blow to the ribs. Knocks the breath clean out of him. He has to stop, press a hand to the punctured-lung ache blooming just above his stomach. 

It’s Rise Falcon. He’d know her anywhere. All hangars look the same, in every Shatterdome he’s seen across three countries, expanse of industrial concrete, scaffolding, neck-craningly high ceilings to accommodate their occupants, and for a moment he isn’t in Sydney at all. There was a story they’d been set for English study at school before he left for the jaeger academy, this man who’d been allowed to lead his wife out of death so long as he didn’t look back. But of course he did. People always do, in stories or out of them. Nobody can subsist on blind faith alone. Jaemin keeps his eyes fixed on the jaeger in front of him as he takes one step forward, and then another, and then another. 

Up closer, she isn’t exactly the same as the Falcon he remembers, a shade darker, armour a little sleeker. His eyes snag on every detail that’s a slipped half-step out of place. The angle of an elbow joint. The plated detail curving over a flank. He doesn’t know whether he’s grateful for the mismatch or furious. The memory overlays itself, obscures, flock of birds displaced in a mad flurry of wingbeats. He can’t recall what the original Falcon looked like at all.

“Yes, it’s Rise Falcon,” someone calls out. “Two-point-oh.”

For a wild moment he thinks the voice is coming from the jaeger herself. Then his vision telescopes down to a figure on the crosswalk near her shoulder, long limbs, slouched posture, standard-issue engineer jumpsuit; Jaemin finds himself straightening up in irritation, as if to compensate. “I‘m aware,” Jaemin says shortly. 

“So I guess you’re already acquainted,” says Lee Donghyuck from the Busan Shatterdome, leaning forward against the metal railing, as if he doesn’t know exactly who Jaemin is, one almost-Ranger to a not-really-Ranger-anymore. The face Jaemin’d looked up in a PPDC database using Jeno’s credentials peers down at him. It occurs to him that Donghyuck’s clearance is probably higher than Jaemin’s, right now.

Everything rises like a tide. Jaemin swallows. “She’s beautiful,” he says. 

“Of course she is,” Donghyuck says. His voice ricochets off the metal struts, filters weirdly down to Jaemin’s level. “I rebuilt her.”

“I can see that,” Jaemin says. Having to look up at Donghyuck is not especially helping his mood. A little meanly, he adds, “Didn’t you have a jaeger custom-built for you?”

It doesn’t dent Donghyuck’s demeanour at all, or at least not visibly. “Cyber Angel,” he says, a little wistfully. “She’s still in Busan. She’s got a new pair of pilots now, since me and Mark-hyung didn’t—anyway, she has this plasma sword, it’s fucking awesome. I built one into Rise Falcon too. In her new arm.”

Nausea spiders out from the pit of Jaemin’s stomach. Donghyuck doesn’t have the right. Rise Falcon is _Jaemin’s_, Jaemin’s and Renjun’s, but he’s the sole inheritor of that legacy now, and knowing that she’d been in the hands of a stranger to be reshaped into something foreign makes him sick to the marrow. Bitter in his mouth. Blood in his ears. He cannot stay in this hangar for a single second longer. He gets out some kind of conversation wrap-up, bare minimum courtesy, and without looking at Donghyuck again goes straight to Jeno’s office, where he’s sorting through 3D renders for jaeger parts too magnified for Jaemin to identify. 

“You’re quiet today,” Jeno says, after a while.

“Am I?”

Jeno just looks at him. Jaemin’s too rattled to maintain the levity, hates that he’s let one conversation get to him this badly, but the damage is done.

Jaemin taps his index finger against his knee. “The new jaeger,” he says. “It’s Rise Falcon. Did you know?”

“No,” Jeno says, frowning. “I would have told you if I’d known, you _know_ I would.”

“I know,” Jaemin says. “It’s just—”

“You’re sure it’s Rise Falcon?”

“Yeah,” Jaemin says. “It was like—” He makes a closed fist over his heart. The words come out in uneven bursts. “I could feel it. I knew as soon as I saw. Fuck, I can’t believe they gave _my_ jaeger to _Lee Donghyuck_ to just—fuck around with, or—she’s different now. I still recognised her, but she isn’t the same as she was when we—when Injunnie and I…”

He blinks the heat out of his eyes. His heart is trying to crawl out of his throat.

“I didn’t even know they’d salvaged Falcon,” Jeno says gently.

“Me neither,” Jaemin says. “I thought I’d at least get a heads-up or something, like, hey, here’s the ghost of your old jaeger we fished out of the fucking depths, with a brand new laser sword for an arm! Would’ve liked to be prepared for that.”

Jeno reaches over and lays a hand over Jaemin’s, which is when Jaemin realises he’s curled his hands into fists so tight his knuckles look like they’re about to erupt out of his skin. It’s embarrassing, how much territory he’s ceded back to instinct, since Scrapgun. Simple things like this, primal affect he used to be able to brush off, sugarcoat, wield at will. As if the ocean washed something loose and now all he can do is react like a fucking prey animal, always on the back foot. With some effort, he forces himself to relax.

When he’d woken up after Scrapgun, Jeno’s face had been the first thing he’d seen. He told him he’d been out for three days. A civilian family had stumbled across his unconscious body on the beach, his drivesuit unmistakeable, and he’d been airlifted back to the Shanghai Shatterdome. As far as recovery periods went it was unremarkable. He had a couple of cracked vertebrae, torso one massive bruise, but nothing especially life-threatening. It wasn’t fair, that he was the one who survived when he hadn’t even been awake through it. That he didn’t get to keep his jaeger, or his copilot, or his old self. 

This is a Falcon Renjun won’t ever know. That’s the part that feels most like a betrayal. He let go, in the water. Everything slipping and sifting through his fingers. Underneath Jeno’s palm his hand is still and loose.

“Things keep changing,” Jaemin says evenly. 

Jeno’s eyes are warm. Neither of them move their hands.

He doesn’t pass all the psych evaluations but he does pass enough of them to get his Kwoon Room clearance back, and then star engineer whatevers are the last thing on his mind because finally, _finally_, he can spar again. It doesn’t count as _fake it until you make it_ if it isn’t really faking. Sure, it’s irritating that he still doesn’t have full Ranger status yet, on account of how lack of success is not something he particularly enjoys, but it’s a step closer than he’d been before. 

Inside the Sydney Shatterdome’s Kwoon Room for the first time, Jaemin stretches, the exact sequence of movements their old fightmaster had taught him. Beside him, Jeno does the same. Of course he’d asked Jeno to be his sparring partner; there’s nobody else he’d allow to see him through the readjustment period. Not Serim, not Yuna, not Hyunjoon, not any of the other officers he’s friendly with. He’d made sure there weren’t any scheduled combat classes running today. His inner circle had been two people, and now it’s one.

The problem is, obviously, that Jeno has conscientiously kept up his Kwoon Room training to Ranger standard even though he isn’t one, and Jaemin hasn’t touched a staff in months. Fitness shouldn’t be a problem, because being placed on mandatory leave meant that his three options for passing the time had been staying holed up in his room, bothering Jeno in his office, or working out, and while he’d have been happy to stick with the first two, some sense of duty kept him racking up kilometres at the Shatterdome gym. But technique is a capricious thing, loses its clarity so easily. Once he’d gotten feverishly ill back at the academy and missed a week of training, and it took him twice as long to get back to the level he’d been at before. There was nothing worse than fumbling moves he could still remember executing faultlessly. He knew exactly what to do, it was just that his body wouldn’t get the damn message.

“Ready?” Jeno asks, picking up two staves off the rack at the side of the room and passing one to Jaemin. 

Jaemin closes his fingers around the polished wood, worn smooth by the hands of hundreds of cadets. He tests the weight, curls his wrists back and forth a few times. The motion does not feel familiar to him at all. “Are you?”

“Wanna go through some forms first?” Jeno takes up his position in the ring. His stance looks perfect, probably is. 

“No need,” Jaemin says. He shifts his grip, then shifts it back. Maybe it’ll fall into place when he’s in the moment. It’s not a very convincing thought. “Don’t go easy on me.”

Jeno does not hold back. Flurry of movement, one-nil. Defensive stance, clumsy block. Impact of wood on wood shudders up Jaemin’s arms. Way too slow. The memory won’t resurface fast enough. Two-nil. Lucky hit, though Jaemin would never classify it like that out loud, and it’s two-one. Jeno rallies, near effortless. Three-one. Four-one. 

Jaemin ducks back, disengages. Staff dangling limp in his grip. His shoulders burn. He needs a fucking break. No, that isn’t true: he only wants one, or at least his body does. Jeno looks at him, clear-eyed and patient, on the other end of the mat, and if it were anyone else—but it’s Jeno, who’s seen him through the worst moments of his life, who never wavered once, not when they were five, not when they were twenty-two, not now.

His breath scrapes at his throat. He lifts his staff. “Again,” he says.

By the end of the session he’s more ache than body. The final score is too embarrassing to even think about, uncomfortable swoop like the bottom of his stomach is falling out when he remembers how perfectly matched he and Jeno used to be in the academy, how bitter the difference in their current standards tastes, Jeno remote and unknowable on the other side when he knows what it’d felt like being Drift compatible with him. But there were moments where he’d felt it, instinct or deeper, the movements of his body in precise coordination, force of something greater than the both of them expanding to fill the space between them. Landing a hit on Jeno, his body telling him he’d done it right. The broad strokes of the muscle memory are all still there. He just needs to draw in the details.

Actually he’d entered the academy with Jeno. Flown halfway across the world to Kodiak Island, Jeno dozing off in the airplane seat beside him. It was still relatively early days, then, no calculus of compatibility yet. The sample space just wasn’t big enough to be picky. But if anyone was going to be Drift compatible it would be he and Jeno, and their perfectly even back-and-forth in the Kwoon Room felt like an extension of an old conversation, such a foregone conclusion it was barely even worth the energy to feel smug about it, though he did anyway. 

By the time they graduated Jeno had every department beating down his door, but he’d wanted to go into J-Tech since he was fourteen, to their fightmaster’s despair. At that point Jaemin was already neck-deep in simulations, Pons training intensives, preparing for deployment. Reaching across the neural bridge to find Renjun reaching back. 

Renjun had transferred into their cohort six weeks into the first trimester. Arrived halfway through a Kwoon session, even, toeing off his shoes at the edge of the mat, his stature at complete odds with the practised ease of his grip on the staff. Five moves later Jaemin was flat on his back. Five more and it was Renjun with the breath knocked out of him. Strike, counterstrike. Somewhere around six-all he lost count—stopped keeping count altogether. He could almost see each movement of Renjun’s body an infinitesimal moment before he actually made it, like a double-exposed film reel, adjusting his responses to match that premonition, knowing without knowing that Renjun was doing the same. Sparring with Jeno was like falling into step but sparring with Renjun was like atomic collision. Nuclear fission type of feeling.

_That’s enough!_ rang out like an alarm and Jaemin jolted awake. Suddenly Jaemin was hyperaware of the weight of the staff in his hands, the taut elastic tension of every muscle pulling his body upright, the way the boy on the other side of the mat stared at him, wide-eyed, familiar, though he hadn’t even known his name yet, back then.

But he’d fought him. There was a knowing in that.

_Congratulations,_ the fightmaster said, sounding a little stunned. _You’re Drift compatible,_ and the rest, as they say, is history.

The Sydney Shatterdome’s cafeteria staff tend to make some interesting culinary decisions to account for local tastes. Not even in terms of fusion cuisine or anything, just a weird overall lack of flavour intensity. Jaemin got used to it a few months in, but he misses breakfast in Shanghai, soy milk fresh with grit, jian bing loaded with coriander and sweet bean paste and wrapped around golden shards of deep-fried wonton skin. Also chili oil and chili paste that were actually spicy and didn’t taste like they had been pressed out of the sad faded ghosts of chilis. _You burnt your tastebuds off with all those disgusting eight-shot Americanos, _ says Renjun’s voice in his head, _what do you know about flavour?_ Five months into deployment Renjun had started drinking his coffee black, and Jaemin found jasmine tea creeping into his daily routine. 

The steamed buns here, though. Ascribing effect to cause: the two trays set out at breakfast vanish almost instantly. You have to be nearby when they restock, or you'll miss out. Jaemin has no idea what it is about the precise pork mince/spring onion/diced cabbage/seasoning/dark sorcery ratio of the filling that makes them so good, but they’re worth loitering around the cloches for. 

Today he’s in luck—there's a single bun left out on the trays, a round of dimpled white dough surrounded by little squares of condensation where the others sat before getting snatched up. It's Jaemin's win. He reaches out, and a hand darts in and plucks the last bun off the platter seconds before Jaemin’s fingers get there. Quicksilver blur of motion and it’s gone. 

“What the fuck?” Jaemin says, incredulous, to the empty space freshly vacated by Lee Donghyuck the fucking queue-cutter.

Donghyuck’s back recedes into the crowd. Jaemin clutches the sides of his steamed-bun-deprived tray, half-blind with rage. Exhale. Not worth getting this worked up over it. Composed again, he ladles himself a bowl of seaweed and tofu soup, and scoops out some lacklustre rice from the thermos, and pretends he intended it when he accidentally serves himself twice as much kkakdugi as he’d normally get because he is, unfortunately, worked up over it. It’s like Donghyuck’s existence is optimally calculated to cause him pain. 

Somehow the day manages to get worse from there. At one in the afternoon he finds himself in Marshall Wu’s office standing a carefully curated metre away from the man of the hour. The full brunt of the Australian summer sun is in his eyes, because Marshall Wu never draws the curtains over the windows behind her desk. She probably does it for intimidating effect. He fights the urge to tear up from the sheer brightness.

“Ranger Na,” says Marshall Wu, which is a joke if he’s ever heard one. He is barely a ranger at this point. He is scraping the bottom of the goddamn role barrel. “Why don’t you be a good host and show Engineer Lee around the city to help him settle in?”

Jaemin stares at the beautifully framed photograph of Marshall Wu and her MMA-world-champion-slash-supermodel wife on the desk in despair, waiting for his vision to kick back in. “Of course,” he says mechanically. “I’d love to.”

If he’s been tasked with being a good host then he is going to be a damn good host. In Shanghai the Marshall always sent him and Xukun out as the designated PR spokespeople for a reason, after all. “I’ll be honest with you,” Jaemin says, as he and Donghyuck pass through the Shatterdome’s front gates. “There’s actually nothing to do in this city.”

“My tour guide’s defective, can I trade in for a new one?” Donghyuck probably means it as a joke, but it sets Jaemin’s teeth on edge anyway. More for his own benefit than Donghyuck’s, Jaemin compensates with a charming smile.

On a rational level, there are plenty of things to not dislike about Donghyuck. His objectively superlative simulation drop-to-kill ratio, for one. The effort he’s contributing towards postponing the apocalypse with his engineer work, for two. Maybe Donghyuck has some kind of rare debilitating medical condition that necessitates disrespect for other people’s prior and obvious claims on limited edition food items, Jaemin wouldn’t know. 

“The—I don’t know, there’s this, like, hall in this university that everyone wants to see, because it’s built out of sandstone. And there are flowers there right now.”

“You’re doing an excellent job of selling this,” Donghyuck says. He sticks his hands in his pockets. “How far away is it?”

“Like… ten minutes by bus.”

“No way,” Donghyuck says immediately. “I’m not getting fucking scalped by the public transport again. Hey, why is it so expensive here?”

Jaemin can’t find fault with this, because he agrees. “Well, other than the harbour—” he gestures at the row of wharfs, “there’s nothing else to see. We can walk downtown, but Sydney’s just like any other city. Except smaller. And more expensive.”

Since this is the least objectionable option, they end up walking away from the waterfront towards the city centre. Jaemin plays tour guide, though he’s pretty sure Donghyuck is asking questions just for the sake of it; he knows Donghyuck knows what a tram is. The chocolate cafe next to the train station doesn’t look too busy through the glass front, so Jaemin steers them towards the entrance. In the gold of the afternoon sunlight Donghyuck’s profile glows. 

“I know you want to ask,” Jaemin says. “Just ask, it’s fine, I don’t care.” 

“I’m not gonna make you answer if you don’t want to, holy shit,” Donghyuck says. “I’m not, like, _evil?_ You don’t have to tell me anything. It’s just—I spent eight months working on Rise Falcon.”

Sun through the glass wall, the skin on the back of his hand turns amber. “I had a copilot,” Jaemin says, “and then I didn’t.” 

The curiosity in Donghyuck’s eyes dampens. “I saw the live broadcast,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

Jaemin is a Ranger without a copilot. Donghyuck is also a Ranger without a copilot. The difference is that Donghyuck’s never had one in the first place, and he has no idea what it’s like with all that empty space in your head. Strange how you don’t notice the absence until you’ve experienced the opposite. 

“Sometimes I’m worried I’ll forget things,” Jaemin says. Understatement of the millennium. Jaemin is terrified of how fickle memory can be. Already he wakes up some days with sawdust in his mouth and the precise sound of Renjun’s voice fluttering just out of reach, as though gutted and scraped clean by sunlight. 

“You don’t seem like the type,” Donghyuck says. Jaemin just smiles, colourless.

If they’d had a fucking plasma sword or a chainsaw leg or whatever, back with Scrapgun, maybe things would have been different. But they hadn’t. Twenty kilometres off Taiwan’s coastline Rise Falcon crashed into the ocean and didn’t move again, until the PPDC hauled her back out, put her into Donghyuck’s hands. Two out of three bodies rescued from the water, it’s not such a bad ratio, looking at it from the outside. If Jaemin had the luxury of that he’d call it luck, even. 

The walk back to the Shatterdome is spent in relative quiet. Then Donghyuck says, offhand, “I heard a lot about you before I came here.”

“Oh?” Jaemin says. “Did you now.” 

They’ve reached the Shatterdome grounds, now. Donghyuck scans his ID at the entry to the hangar. The doors slide open. “You’re not going to ask me what?”

Jaemin follows Donghyuck through the doorway. Inside, it’s cooler than it is outdoors, though not any darker, eyewatering artificial light sending the shadows scattering and gathering in clumps. “Sure, I’ll bite,” he says. “What did you hear.”

Donghyuck turns to face him. “Everyone calls you the ghost of the Sydney Shatterdome,” he says. Eyes bright as the floodlights checkerboarding the concrete ground behind him. “But I don’t think _you’re_ the ghost at all.”

Ghosts don’t exist, Jaemin thinks. The dead stay dead. Somewhere still and dark and obliteratingly lonely at the bottom of the ocean. 

“You’re right,” is all he says, in the end. “I’m not.”

“You’re going out tonight,” Yerim announces, barging into Jeno’s office without knocking. “Oh, you’re both here, excellent. Two birds, one stone! You’re both going out tonight.”

“Senior Officer Kim Yerim,” Jaemin says. “What a lovely surprise.”

“We are?” Jeno says.

“Yes,” Yerim says. “We are going to pregame in your room, Lee, and then you are going clubbing, I know you two introverts would never bother creatively stretching curfew without me.”

“Why is that a bad thing,” Jeno says sadly.

“But luckily, you do have me,” Yerim continues, unfazed. “And I got you on my girlfriend’s guest list at Embassy, so make sure you get there before 11:30 so you get the discounted entry—”

“So you’re not only forcibly dragging us off-base but we also have to pay for it ourselves,” Jaemin says.

“Nothing in life is free,” Yerim replies. “And I’m already providing you with the alcohol for pres. You will have fun.”

“Is that a threat, noona?” Jaemin says, grinning.

“A promise,” she corrects cheerfully. Her eyes go kind. “When was the last time you guys even left the Shatterdome on unofficial business?” Jaemin opens his mouth. “Lunch breaks off-base don’t count.” Jaemin closes his mouth.

Jeno visibly struggles to remember. “Uh… Sihyeon-noona’s birthday?”

“That was three months ago,” Yerim says.

“We’re busy people,” Jaemin says. “Jeno has a hot date every night at eight sharp with Arena of Valor, I like to get my beauty sleep in. And it takes a lot of sleep to look like this, you know.”

“God, I keep saying it but what would you guys do without me,” Yerim sighs. As Jaemin learned over a semi-intoxicated conversation at a bar table shouted over the DJ’s terrible dubstep beats months ago, Yerim’s family migrated to Australia when she was two, so she’d grown up here, has all the insider knowledge and the accent too. She’d taken Jeno under her wing when he first arrived at the Sydney Shatterdome, and then by extension Jaemin. 

Jeno says, “Can Donghyuck come too?”

Jaemin narrows his eyes. “Since when did you talk to Donghyuck?”

“Donghyuck is nice,” Jeno says, a touch defensive.

“Does Donghyuck have regular ID?” Yerim says. As per Yerim’s priorities, they all got equipped with fake, non-PPDC-issue IDs a while back, courtesy of a shadowy entity none of them had actually met known mononymously as Ten. He was allegedly an acquaintance of Doyoung’s, but none of them had any intent to fact-check that with Doyoung. “Whatever, I’ll get Chaeng to add him to her guest list too, if he doesn’t you’ll just have to ditch him outside.”

Yerim's pronoun choice finally clicks. “Wait, you’re not coming with us?” Jaemin asks.

“Nope, I have a date night scheduled.” Yerim inspects her flawless French tips, leaning against the doorframe. “That’s why I’m making sure you get smashed first, I’m a responsible host. Like I said. You will have fun.”

Truthfully the Sydney nightlife scene is rather dismal. Nearly everything closes by six, even on weekends. In Shanghai, when Jaemin had been more in the habit of going out, they wouldn’t even have left the Shatterdome before eight. But Jeno is by nature a homebody, and Jaemin is more comfortable when Jeno is comfortable, so it’s hard to justify doing the same here.

As promised, Yerim leaves them for her girlfriend partway through a six-pack of illegally procured beer, one of the two cases she’d dumped on Jeno’s dresser, along with a couple of stray bottles of peach soju. The soju bottles are empty now, lined up neatly at the foot of Jeno’s bed between empty beer bottles like an art installation, after an approximately eighty-twenty split of effort between Yerim and Jaemin.

Jeno, who’d stuck primarily to beer, blinks wetly and owlishly at Jaemin. “Can we get Donghyuck now,” he whines. Alcohol always makes him a baby. To be fair, it does take a significant amount to get him to that stage. Jaemin’s own alcohol tolerance has increased somewhat since their underage drinking adventures at the academy, thanks to Renjun’s impressive and apparently Drift-transferable liquor-holding capabilities, but he’s never really liked drinking anyway, always preferred to leave that arena of social life to Renjun and Jeno. 

“I think you pregamed a bit too hard,” Jaemin says, pulling Jeno’s hood down over his eyes. Jeno makes a pitiful noise. Jaemin twists the cap off a bottle of spring water and works it into Jeno’s hand until he’s mostly certain Jeno won’t spill it all over himself. “Drink at least half of this, I’ll go find Donghyuck.”

“Do you know where his room is?” Jeno asks.

“No, I was planning to just knock on every door in the engineer wing,” Jaemin says.

“Really?”

Jaemin laughs. “No. Of course I know his where his room is.” 

He actually doesn’t. He has to message Yuna for Donghyuck’s room number, which Yuna naturally knows because she has an uncanny ability to know all the secrets of the universe. Thus equipped, he heads over to the engineer wing and knocks on the door labelled _666_. It swings open to reveal Donghyuck, who gives Jaemin a mildly cautious look and does not make any move to let Jaemin in.

“Hey,” Jaemin says.

Donghyuck blinks warily at him. “Yeah?”

“Do you have any ID? Like, not PPDC ID. I don’t care if it’s real so long as it has your face on it.” 

Donghyuck blinks again, more slowly. “Like my passport? Which is one hundred percent genuine, by the way. Are you planning to steal my identity? You realise we look nothing alike, right?”

“Passport, guess that’ll do,” Jaemin mutters. It won’t do anyone any good if Donghyuck loses that; he’ll have to get Donghyuck in touch with Ten sometime soon. “Okay, be at the northeast exit in fifteen and bring your passport. We’re going out.”

This earns him an eyebrow raise. “Who is _we_?”

“You, me, Jeno.”

“And what makes you think I’m coming with you? I had a very exciting Netflix marathon planned for tonight, you know.”

“Jeno wants you to come,” Jaemin says. He’s hoping that Donghyuck is susceptible to the Jeno effect, by which people even passingly acquainted with Jeno are compelled to do any variety of things to indulge him. If he so chose, Jeno could have a highly successful career as a siren of Greek myth, or a sugar baby. “Your marathon can wait, I’m sure it won’t mind.”

It works on Donghyuck. “Fine,” he sighs. Then he wrinkles his nose. "Are you drunk?"

“No,” Jaemin says. “Jeno is, though.” He opens his mouth and experiences a momentary lapse in judgement he will later classify as the loose-lipped effect of alcohol kicking in. “Do you like beer?”

So in the end it’s all three of them emerging from Jeno’s dorm room in varying stages of intoxication. Donghyuck is much more agreeable after two beers, and Jaemin’s feeling the warmth of the buzz too. He doesn’t remember what they’re laughing about, but fuck if it isn’t so funny he might actually die.

They manage to find their way from the Shatterdome to the club and join the queue winding around the side of the building. Jaemin turns a winning smile on the staff member who comes to check their ID. “We’re on Chaeyoung Son’s guest list. Jaemin Na, Jeno Lee, Donghyuck Lee,” he says, in English, handing her his fake driver's license. She gives it the barest once-over before handing it back. Jeno’s too, and Donghyuck’s, though there’s a slight pause when Donghyuck produces his passport. 

She scrolls down her iPad. And keeps scrolling. Yeri’s girlfriend’s guest list is seemingly endless, but eventually she manages to find and mark them all off. “No problem,” she says, distributing laminated tokens out of the elastic-banded stack she fishes from her pocket to the three of them. “Just show these to the guys at the front when you get up there. Twenty-five in cash for entry.”

Jaemin turns the little plastic square over in his fingers. “Thank you,” he says. 

If they flashed their PPDC credentials they’d be in within seconds, VIP treatment, red carpet rollout. But that’s not the kind of person Jaemin is, or wants to be, and the anonymity is fun, in its own way. Standing in line next to the glass hotel wall with all the other clubgoers waiting for admission, bracing themselves against the unseasonable chill, as though they too could be any twentysomethings hitting pause on the work or study commitments for a night, the end of the world via hideous transdimensional alien monster onslaught a distant and as yet unconfronted fact of life. What fucking kaiju. Just two kilometres away from the maw of the ocean, barely a handful of strides in Rise Falcon, life beyond the Shatterdome persists.

The bouncer ushers them into the elevator, hits the button for the fourth floor. The doors close, then open again. Twenty dollar note, five dollar note, plastic token. In exchange: stamp on the wrist, the thin outline of a heart. Right over his pulse point. He stares at it, black ink, no shimmer. There was another club Yerim took them to at the start of the year where the entry stamp had been an acid blue, bright enough to be bioluminescent. Too much ink smudging the detail, it was impossible to tell what the design was supposed to be. When he scrubbed the stamp off in the bathroom sink afterwards it left a stain on the back of his hand like a birthmark.

He clamps a hand around Jeno’s wrist, and then on second thought Donghyuck’s too, and with a boy in each hand he pushes his way through the U-shaped dancefloor curving around the central bar. It’s not a particularly large establishment, already packed with people, but there must be something up with the acoustics, because as they move further in it turns out each end of the dancefloor has its own separate DJ, sound diminishing to inarticulate beat in the middle bar area. The low lights strobe violet and deep red over skin, undercut by the shuddering bass. Everywhere Jaemin looks light catches on something, sequins, silver ear cuff, gold bangle, black shine of the bar table, someone’s teeth.

Crush of bodies. They end up integrating into another group by necessity, there’s just not enough space on the floor. As it turns out Donghyuck is, undeniably, a good dancer. An effortless, liquid quality to his movements; it must be what he's like in the Kwoon Room too. All of the pilots Jaemin has ever known dance the same way they fight, that physicality distinct no matter what form it takes. It’s just—incredible, on Donghyuck. Magnetic. 

“I need some air,” Jaemin shouts over the thudding EDM, next to Jeno’s ear. “Stay with Donghyuck.”

Jeno nods. Donghyuck’s eyes are shut. Sweat gleams down the long line of his throat. The flashing lights turn his skin the colour of a sunset. 

Out on the balcony area cigarette smoke wreaths the city view in grey. Jaemin squints through the haze and makes his way to a long, unoccupied table set up along the wall, shadowed by the huge fronds of a potted plant. A surreptitious swipe of his nail down the edge of a leaf strand tells him it’s real. 

He’s just taken a seat when a girl in a light blue two-piece taps him on the shoulder. “Mind if I sit?”

“Not my table,” Jaemin says. The placard on the table reads _THIS TABLE IS RESERVED FOR: Lucy’s Party :), _but nobody’s come to claim his chair yet. “But go right ahead.”

“Thanks,” she says, sitting down with obvious relief, her back to the table. She leans forward to readjust the ankle straps of her heels, the same muted blue as her outfit. Straightens up, blinks at Jaemin. Glitter in her dark lashes winking in the low light. “Hey, you kinda look like that one jaeger pilot, the pink-haired guy, from—Revolution Falcon? Something like that? Sorry. Do you get that a lot?”

“I do,” Jaemin says. The night settles stickily against his skin, clings like a film. As though it could render him unrecognisable. Recklessness itches at him. He wants a drink, mostly for something to hold, or to see his face in, reflected strangely off the side of the glass. “But thank you. I wouldn’t mind being him.”

On Thursday there’s a double event off the coast of Naha, twin Category IIIs, and Shanghai’s Obelisk Torment and Busan’s Cyber Angel are dispatched to take care of it. Things turn dicey when the second kaiju Juggernaut gets a little too close for comfort to the defense perimeter, but a stunning combo, Obelisk Torment pinning it just long enough for Cyber Angel to lop its head clean off from behind, and it’s over. Not a single splatter of kaiju blue anywhere near land.

It’s Cyber Angel’s first drop, her rookie pilots Kim Doyeon and Choi Yoojung wide-eyed but admirably unflustered in front of the cameras at the following press conference. Yiren and Xukun are there too, fielding questions with the slick nonchalance of mediaplay veterans, and it makes Jaemin sick with nostalgia. He hasn’t really kept in contact with them since moving to Sydney. At first he told himself it was the adjustment period, new country and everything. One year in the justification doesn’t quite hold up anymore, but it’s all he’s got.

Jaemin isn’t in LOCCENT when the attack happens. He watches some of the news footage afterwards, spliced together from the jaeger cameras and a couple of foolhardy news choppers. Juggernaut and Drakaz, indistinguishable from one another except for the bony crest bristling down Juggernaut’s skull, are wiry, long-limbed, smallish for kaiju, quadripedal. Not like the sheer colossal immensity that was Scrapgun, fifteen thousand tonnes of toxic tissue towering out of the ocean.

He spends the rest of the afternoon doing laps in the indoor pool until the feeling of water on his skin stops crawling. In the academy he and Renjun and Jeno used to take huge lungfuls of air and sink to the bottom of the pool, competing to see who could hold out the longest before needing to resurface. Renjun’s idea, obviously. Chlorine stinging his eyes as he sat on the tiled pool floor watching the wavering blue sheen of everything as seen through water, haloing drift of hair in the false current. Silence, lightheadedness. A few times early on he’d come close to passing out but he quickly figured out how to toe the line, how to quiet the panic of a body on the verge of shutting down. When he climbs out of this pool in Sydney, muscles loose with exhaustion, he barely feels the chill of the conditioned air skimming off his wet skin at all. The only one who was in the water, he’s the winner by default. 

The official announcement comes out a couple months after Rise Falcon’s arrival. The rumours are true: Lee Donghyuck is looking for his perfect copilot match right here in Sydney! All applicants to report to the Kwoon Room for evaluation! Jaemin had almost forgotten the second part of Rise Falcon coming back to him, which is that someone else will be flying her. She should have stayed at the bottom of the ocean. At least she’d be undisturbed. Not Jaemin’s, but nobody else’s either.

For the first few days, Jaemin is successful in avoiding the Kwoon Room when Donghyuck’s compatibility audition sessions are ongoing. Then on the third day he walks into the room right as Donghyuck disarms someone with a cheery call of _Six-two!_

He's about to walk back out, sour over everything in his life, but Donghyuck makes eye contact and smiles, devilish. “Want a go?” Donghyuck challenges, twirling his staff around in his hand. 

Jaemin’s been sparring almost daily with Jeno, joins Sihyeon and Serim in the ring sometimes. Not up to the standard he’d been at before, not yet. But certainly getting closer. And he was here first, anyway. Even if he’s not at his best he can surely outperform green cadets who’ve never Drifted in a real jaeger. Show them how it’s done.

Confidence is easy. “Sure,” Jaemin says, stepping up onto the mat. 

They bow to one another. Take their opening stances. Where Jeno prefers defensive forms to start with for the strategic advantage, Donghyuck’s is neutral, strange to see firsthand. He could wait Donghyuck out, psychological clash, but it’ll be quicker to crush him outright. 

Jaemin moves first, staff whistling out, perfect arc. Donghyuck moves like he’s on fast-forward. He’s still, and then he isn’t, staff coming up to block the strike. A rapidfire sequence of blows, and— 

Contact. It takes Jaemin’s body a second to register the hit, the shock of pain below his ribs lagging behind the physical movement. “One-nil,” Donghyuck says.

And it’s like the first time he’d ever been disarmed outright in combat, the breath knocked clean out of him, looking up at the steely eyes at the other end of the staff pressed to his chest. Nobody had ever landed a hit first on him before and here he was, laid flat on his back by a slip of a boy, and he’d gotten back up and given just as good afterwards, but—that moment of wonder. Knowing with perfect certainty that he’d been matched.

Twist of the wrists and his staff is free. Surprise registers on Donghyuck’s face for a heartbeat, surest sign of inexperience. Jaemin already has his staff pressed to Donghyuck’s stomach. One-all. “Keep up,” Jaemin calls.

The grin that splits Donghyuck’s face in response is hard and immediate. “Oh, we’re being serious now?” A feint to Jaemin’s left that’s so obviously broadcasted it’s got to be a double fakeout, and sure enough when Jaemin brings his staff cross-body to defend his left side it clashes against Donghyuck’s. If it’s a game of brute strength Jaemin has the advantage. Jaemin’s staff makes contact.

“Come on, that’s not your idea of serious,” Jaemin says. A hum under his skin like a current. “Two-one.”

But Donghyuck’s hard to pin, slips out of the hold like a fish. Whirls around, another hit. “Don’t you mean two-two?” Donghyuck says, picture of innocence. 

Jaemin stops talking, stops thinking. Just acts. Strike, counter, strike, counter. Donghyuck fights precisely the same way he dances, that deceptively careless ease of movement. You were lulled into thinking you had him and then he was gone again. 

"I think we've seen enough." That's Marshall Wu's voice, cleaving through the air. Donghyuck and Jaemin almost leap apart, staves disengaging, standing at attention for the Marshall. Jaemin hadn't even noticed her arrival in the Kwoon Room.

The sound of his own heartbeat is indistinct, as though coming from very far away. That familiar sense of resurfacing. Ice in his stomach. He knows exactly what it means. When Donghyuck looks at him Jaemin feels it. Electric field emanation, precursor to the Drift. It doesn’t need to be said. The way neither of them had bothered to introduce themselves, when they’d met in the hangar for the first time, knowledge before the knowledge. 

Come on, Jaemin thinks. Say something, slice through the moment. You always have something sharp on the tip of your tongue. 

But Donghyuck is silent. Staff held out to the side, leaving himself open, does he even realise? If Jaemin moved now Donghyuck wouldn’t have time to block the blow. The tip of his staff pressed against Donghyuck’s unprotected stomach, chest, throat, tilting the match in his favour. Not enough to negate anything that's already come to pass, but it would make a point. Who is he trying to prove himself to, that’s the only question. He holds still. Doesn’t move a muscle. 

“Congratulations,” Marshall Wu says, her voice as immaculate as her suit. She’s smiling. “I think we’ve found our new pilots.”

Donghyuck sets his lunch tray down on Jaemin’s table with a decisive clatter. “Mark-hyung wants to FaceTime you,” he says, in a tone of utter vehemence so pronounced it takes Jaemin a moment to parse the relatively innocuous words actually spoken.

“Okay?” Jaemin says. He sets his chopsticks down. Donghyuck folds himself into the seat opposite Jaemin.

“He doesn’t even have an iPhone, he has to borrow Taeyong-hyung’s,” Donghyuck mutters. “He never FaceTimes _me_. Just because I have Taeyong-hyung’s number blocked…”

“Well,” Jaemin says, dragging the syllable out. “There is what some may call an obvious solution to your problem.”

“If Mark-hyung really cared he would find a way,” Donghyuck sniffs.

“Why do you even have Lee Taeyong’s number blocked, what did Starve Venom ever do to you?”

“Oh, you know, nothing,” Donghyuck says airily. “Except _steal my copilot._”

For some reason this stings. “You have me now, though,” Jaemin says, light, trying to filter the injury out of his voice. The prospect doesn’t even feel real yet. Here he is, talking to Donghyuck about the Drift like it isn’t corroded through with saltwater like bullet holes, but there’s a time and place for that particular wound and it isn’t now.

That considering light comes back into Donghyuck’s eyes. “I guess I do,” he says. “But Taeyong-hyung’s number is staying blocked, it’s the principle of the thing. Anyway, I need your number to send to Mark-hyung.” He holds his phone out. Jaemin takes it and punches in his contact details. 

“Where’s Starve Venom these days? Busan?” Jaemin says, handing the phone back to Donghyuck.

“Vancouver,” Donghyuck corrects. “Come on, if they were in Busan why would Cyber Angel have been sent out with Obelisk Torment instead of Starve Venom during that double event in Japan?”

Jaemin rolls his eyes and ignores this. “What’s the time difference?”

“Sixteen hours—wait, no, seventeen hours here. No, daylight saving means eighteen hours.” Donghyuck makes a face like the concept of time zones is a personal affront. “Anyway, I’ll text you Taeyong-hyung’s number so you know it’s not a weirdo stalker trying to call you.”

Picking up his lunch tray again, Donghyuck gets up and swans out of the cafeteria altogether. Seems like a lot of effort for a show of theatrics, but whatever makes Donghyuck happy, Jaemin supposes. 

The truth: Jaemin misses piloting. That rush, that invincibility, that certainty of knowledge. That perfect trust in your body that was your copilot’s body that was your jaeger. _If I die, let it be in a jaeger._ Why hadn’t he— 

It feels strange to have Lee Taeyong hanging out in his contacts, so Jaemin saves the number as STARVE VENOM just for the novelty of fielding a call from the face of the jaeger program herself. To complete the look, he sets Starve Venom’s official cartoon mascot as the contact profile picture. The older generation of jaegers all got cutesy cartoon designs as part of a promotional campaign for the jaeger academy, animated shorts, merchandise, the works. One of Renjun’s biggest gripes had always been that the PPDC hadn’t done a second round of that campaign to include the newer jaegers, specifically Rise Falcon. He’d drawn up some mock designs himself, direct action, stuck the printouts on the wall in their dorm room. They’re probably still up there, unless their old room has been reassigned to someone else. 

The call comes in around three in the afternoon. As it turns out, Mark Lee is more handsome over a palm-sized, slightly pixelated screen than the relentless jaeger academy promotional material with his face plastered all over, something about seeing that face animated that makes Jaemin understand a little better why the PPDC picked him out of the entire pool of active jaeger pilots worldwide to represent them. It’s hard to define. Cosmically beloved Ranger Mark Lee. 

“Hey!” Mark says. There’s a slight lag between the audio and the visuals, which Jaemin attributes to the seriously shoddy wi-fi quality in the Sydney Shatterdome. It’s just another thing he’s had to adjust to. “I’m Mark, Donghyuck told you I’d be calling, right?”

“He did,” Jaemin confirms politely. “It’s nice to meet you, Mark-ssi.”

“Aw, you don’t need to be so formal! You’re, like, the sunbae here,” Mark says.

Jaemin is indeed the senior between the two of them, not that it matters in any practical dimension or application. Still, the acknowledgement makes him several times more positively inclined towards Mark. “Technically I’m still on medical leave,” Jaemin says. 

“I’m sorry about your old copilot,” Mark says. Too earnest. Jaemin feels his smile tighten at the edges.

“Me too,” Jaemin says, neutral. “I was surprised to find out I was Drift compatible with Donghyuck.”

Mark catches on to the subject change. “Saw the Kwoon footage off someone’s phone,” he says. “You guys were awesome, what was the score? Eight-all? Nine-all?”

“Oh, you know what they say,” Jaemin says. “What happens in the Kwoon Room stays in the Kwoon Room.”

“Haha, I get you,” Mark says conspiratorially, winking at Jaemin. Jaemin is so taken aback by this gesture he almost misses the start of the ramble Mark promptly launches into. “Anyway, I guess I just wanted to get in touch with you ‘cause Donghyuck’s like, my best friend and all, and I was about to be in copilots with him, and now you’re going to be in copilots with him. So it’s really almost like _we’re_ copilots, kind of.”

It really is not like they are copilots at all. “Drift compatible in law,” Jaemin muses. 

“Don’t tell Donghyuck I said this,” Mark says, “but I know it’s been tough on him, not being able to find anyone else to Drift with for so long. He’s really good, he’s just, like… well, you’ll see. But he deserves to have this. Also can you please ask him to unblock Taeyong-hyung’s number? He said it was an accident last time but I still can’t get through.”

“I’ll pass the message on,” Jaemin says. “I can’t guarantee he’ll listen to me, though. I’m sure you know how he is.”

“Oh, yeah, for sure. Donghyuck is someone who needs a lot of love,” Mark says, laughing. Even over the crackling, lagging connection the affection bleeds through so strongly Jaemin’s breath catches momentarily in his chest. “So please take care of him.”

“Don’t worry, Mark-ssi,” Jaemin says. He smiles pleasantly, with all of his teeth. “I’m good at taking care of people.”

The morning of the scheduled first Drift simulation Jaemin wakes up early to clear his head with a run. Physical demands of the body, the need to pull breath in, it’s calming to push himself with that singleminded focus. He hasn’t Drifted since Scrapgun. Won’t find out the extent of the damage, if any, until he’s in the Drift again. But the principle is unchanged: bring nothing into the Drift and you will be untouchable. One less body in the ocean for Jaemin to carry. All of it comes back to Rise Falcon, centre of gravity, eye of the storm. 

Donghyuck is already in the Drivesuit Room by the time Jaemin arrives post-shower, suited up, helmet under his arm. “Don’t chase the RABIT,” he says, as Jaemin’s opening his mouth to say the same to him. Like Donghyuck is the one with five years of pilot experience under his belt. 

He grins at Jaemin, the expression too fleeting for Jaemin to determine whether there’s any real mirth in it, and fits his helmet on. Jaemin echoes the movement. Suits, helmets, the physical separation between bodies must always increase before the minds meet. It’s an idle observation and Jaemin doesn’t voice it aloud. Drivesuit technicians flit around them, adjusting clamps and wires.

The trick with relay gel is to not fight it. Keep the mouth open, keep the breathing easy. It was difficult to suppress his body’s instinct to choke the first time he did this, sheer blank terror of drowning as orange liquid flooded into the helmet, but Jaemin prided himself on his control over form, at least at the time. He lets the gel rush into his mouth. No time to register its taste before the bridge connects and he finds himself in the Drift.

Donghyuck’s mind has a million shimmering facets, a crystalline intensity folded over itself so many times it’s like an impossible maze, nothing like Renjun’s headspace. Is this what Mark meant? _Donghyuck_, he calls, into the Drift, trying to withstand the overwhelming rush of memory kaleidoscoping around him. _Donghyuck, are you— _

He doesn’t chase the RABIT so much as the reverse. The RABIT latches onto him, teeth to his throat, shakes him down and he’s gone, caught up in the flood of another life. He’s alone inside the shell of Rise Falcon’s torso, sharp smell of oil and rust, touching reverent fingertips to the jagged mess of her shoulder joint where an arm should be. He’s watching Mark and Taeyong move in perfect tandem rigged up to a test Pons system, the bottom of his stomach dropping out. He’s got Mark pinned down against the mat, staff to his throat, Mark sweaty and laughing and this is it, this is how it’s going to be forever, never a pair like them before. He’s holding his sister’s hand in a shopping mall when the monster that will later become known as Scimitar makes landfall in Incheon.

The same discordant note resonating through every single memory. Donghyuck is so scared of loneliness it burns. No secrets in the Drift. And isn’t that intimacy a kind of violence, too, opening yourself up to the brutality of someone else looking in, almost unbearable. But it goes both ways—distantly he’s aware of Donghyuck rifling through his memories too, excavating flipbook flashes of childhood, and he knows they’re both spiralling out of alignment, losing the Drift. Even more distantly, if he concentrates, he can hear system warnings, the Marshall’s voice forceful with alarm. But he’s in the mess hall at the jaeger academy, hair still wet from the shower he’s just rushed out of to make it to lunch in time, leaning over the table to pluck Mark’s energy drink out of his hand. _Donghyuck,_ Mark says, exasperated, _if you want mine you just have to ask._

A sideways jolt. Recalibration, it wrenches him out of that memory. A new one now. Sharp softness, watercolour hues, none of the iridescence of Donghyuck’s mind. Cobblestone under his shoes. Winter in the air. Jaemin has been here before. A main street in Kodiak, Donghyuck should recognise it too, from the brief weeks of recreational time the academy gave them off between trimesters, just long enough to explore the island. When he tilts his head to the side his passing reflection in a shopfront isn’t himself, it’s Donghyuck’s surprised face looking back at him, and then it’s neither of them at all, it’s— 

He tumbles into consciousness like he’s been doused with icy water. All his limbs disconnected before feeling rushes back into them. For a moment he meets his own eyes through the helmet visor, before he blinks and the afterimage disappears, nerve endings disentangling from Donghyuck’s.

Donghyuck tears his helmet off. Gasping for breath. He looks at Jaemin, gaze now unarmoured, shaken. It isn’t fear, not quite. Something close to it, unnameable. Quick-fingered he detaches himself from the rig and whirls out of the room before Jaemin takes his next breath.

One step behind, Jaemin removes his own helmet. His throat seals itself shut. The aftertaste of relay gel in his mouth goes sour. 

Standing by the monitors, Marshall Wu looks supremely unimpressed. “Anyone care to explain what the hell just happened?”

The post-simulation debrief, which goes ahead sans Donghyuck because he’s apparently vanished into thin air after exiting the room, tosses around a bunch of J-Tech jargon Jaemin is too exhausted to even attempt to parse. He knows Drift compatibility isn’t the be-all-end-all of a working copilot team, just the flashiest prerequisite, but he’s pretty sure that disaster of a neural handshake was some kind of record for two people with their compatibility levels. There’s a lot of sombre frowning and headshaking from the Drift technicians. He stands there politely, spine straight as an arrow, trying to feel slightly less on trial. 

“Two experienced Rangers with plenty of perfect Drifts under their belts _both_ started chasing the RABIT,” Marshall Wu is saying, mouth pressed flat. Jaemin is not looking forward to the official meetings in his immediate future.

More frowning, more headshaking. Jaemin’s tuned most of it out, since he’ll get everything he needs to know out of Jeno anyway, and it’s not like they can initiate any disciplinary or investigative or whatever action with half the subject matter missing. After a whole lot of nothing the meeting ends, everyone dispersing to go and be employed elsewhere, but before Jeno can join them Jaemin stops him, hand on his shoulder.

“So,” Jaemin says. “How bad was it actually.”

He’d let the tech talk from before disintegrate into white noise but the tone of the words still registered, and the expressions. Parsing back through it now, parameter shift: he might have miscalculated. Not disapproval but confusion. 

“Well, your neural bridge sucked,” Jeno says, reaching over to pull up a graph on one of the monitors. “Look.” He points at the two sets of lines, haywire peaks and dips spiralling around each other. “You were so out of sync you nearly broke out of the Drift. That’s when you guys started to chase the RABIT. But here—” Jeno taps the screen, right where the graph abruptly smooths out like a flatlining heart monitor. “All of a sudden you were in sync again. What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Jaemin says slowly. One moment he’d been nineteen and confiscating Mark Lee’s Gatorade for grander purposes and the next he was back in his own head, Donghyuck’s presence like a second heartbeat but not his own anymore.

“‘Cause it’s almost like…” Jeno hesitates. “It’s almost like something else pushed you back into the Drift. Superposition—remember physics class at the academy, how waves can interfere with each other? It’s like there was this third wave cancelling everything out. I could try to subtract yours and Donghyuck’s off the final waveform and get that wave by itself and run it through the database. But you already know, right?”

Jaemin’s arms go numb from fingertips to elbow. “You’re saying—”

“I’m not saying anything,” Jeno says. He touches the inside of Jaemin’s wrist. Unerring over the pulse. “Think of it like a ghost in the machine.”

Not a ghost. More like a sensory impression, memory rewound enough times to leave an imprint, echo of laughter, gleam of a smile, flash of yellow out of the corner of his eye, disappearing around a bend in the corridor. Jaeger technology is steeped in humanity. Muscle memory for a system of titanium alloys and silicon carbides, hooked in deep, subconscious level. Process of unearthing, or earthing. There was never anything to bury in the first place. Physics classes back at the academy, Jeno explaining a resisted motion problem to him lying on the lower bunk in their dorm, a light voice cutting in from the doorway. What’s the terminal velocity of a body falling through water three metres below the surface of the ocean? Ten metres? Twenty? What sound does it make, to let go? 

The first time Jaemin and Renjun Ghost Drifted had been four months into Rise Falcon’s debut. Being a Ranger was a 24/7 type of job, because kaiju didn’t exactly arrive on a schedule, despite the numerous mathematical models K-Science had going, but Marshall Guo managed to wrangle a week off for both of them to visit their families. There were plenty of jaegers covering their geographical area, she’d said. They could spare a few days without Rise Falcon on standby. 

So Jaemin was on a subway platform in Seoul when his ankle gave out on him apropos of absolutely nothing, sharp bubblegum pop of pain like he’d somehow managed to twist it by just standing there. Immediately he crouched down to take the weight off it. He ran his fingers over the bones, checking for swelling, localised aches, redness. Nothing. Gingerly, he stood back up. Still nothing. His ankle was fine, the sense memory already fading. He fished out his phone.

As soon as Renjun picked up Jaemin demanded, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine—ow, _fuck_, watch it! Just, ah, lightly twisted my ankle jumping out of a tree, but it’s all fine—why, what happened?” 

Jaemin blinked, temporarily distracted. “Wait, what were you jumping out of a tree for?”

“Because my cousin was doing it so obviously I had to as well?” Jaemin could hear the eyeroll in the sentence. “Answer my question, Jaemin.”

“I felt it,” Jaemin said. An electric shiver swept down his spine like the swipe of a palm. “My ankle folded but there’s nothing wrong with it, just hurt like a fucker for a second.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah.” 

“Think it’s Ghost Drift?”

“Must be, right?”

Renjun laughed, the sound light and airy over the phone. Two halves of a single movement: Jaemin felt his heart lift, helium balloon, that force of incredulous joy doubled up; it could have been his own or Renjun’s or both. Jaemin in Seoul and Renjun in Jilin and here was the proof Rise Falcon bound them together deeper than anything either of them could comprehend. He’d always wanted permanence. Now he had it.

The biology wasn’t really his area of expertise but it was something like this: the Drift necessitated alignment down to the neurons. Repeat the process enough times and the body started remembering, preempted it even without a neural bridge. An entire ocean apart Jaemin’s body echoed Renjun’s like a harmonic wrung out by resonance. Jaemin’d read somewhere that the cells in the cerebral cortex never renewed themselves. That meant parts of his brain would always carry the imprint of Rise Falcon's Drift. Could, maybe, still slip into alignment. Receiver for a homing signal transmitted all the way from the ocean floor.

Over the next few days it becomes clear that Donghyuck is avoiding him. The Shatterdome is big, sure, but not big enough to chalk the abrupt and total absence of Donghyuck from the general sphere of Jaemin’s life up to probability. Jaemin can’t exactly blame him; he supposes anyone would be alarmed by the experience of what could be described as temporarily getting possessed by their Drift partner’s dead ex-copilot. But it’s like withdrawal symptoms or something: he feels Donghyuck’s absence like a physical injury, phantom limb syndrome. It’s on Donghyuck to come to him, though. Donghyuck didn’t push back when they’d seen the city together, and now Jaemin is returning the favour.

“There’s no way I can let you inside a jaeger with Ranger Lee,” Marshall Wu tells him. “We don’t have the time or the resources to patch your handshake up, and I’m not willing to take the risk of letting you two pilot as you are. We aren’t quite that desperate yet.”

So there go his chances to get back inside Rise Falcon for the foreseeable future. But that's an old bitterness. This is brand new. Impossible not to feel at least a little bit stung by the rejection.

It's a full week without catching even a single glimpse of Donghyuck, to the point where Jaemin’s starting to idly wonder whether he’s actually transferred away on the down-low, before out of nowhere Donghyuck waltzes directly into his room. “Hi,” he announces.

For a split second it’s like every synapse in his brain lights up. Zero contact to full proximity. Jaemin crosses his arms and it subsides. “Are you going to run again?” 

Donghyuck huffs, throwing himself onto the couch. “I didn’t _run,_” he says. “I just needed a moment. A few moments. I don’t Drift and run, who do you even think I am.”

“Okay,” Jaemin says. “So what made you decide to stop… needing a moment.”

Donghyuck presses a forearm over his eyes. Jaemin waits.

“I had this dream,” Donghyuck says, at last. “I was walking down a street. Heading towards the beach. It was the middle of the day, early summer, clear sky. I was holding this, like, frozen mango drink with ice cream on top, it didn’t taste anywhere near as good as it looked. And then I looked up and there was this—something, this dark thing rising out of the ocean far away in the distance,” and Jaemin already knows how this scene plays out, the vastness of it, the finely saturated colours, blues so bright they burned, seen through the eyes of a child to whom the scale of the world was nearly unthinkable. Standing on a beach in Xiamen he’s never been to himself, looking out over the ocean, the shadow on the horizon coalescing into something so monstrous he didn’t have the words to describe it. 

“That’s not one of your memories,” Jaemin says, though it hardly needs to be articulated.

“I know,” Donghyuck says, dropping his arm. “It’s not one of Mark’s, either. And it’s not one of yours.” He doesn’t phrase it as a question. “That's everyone I’ve Drifted with.”

“Yueyue Road,” Jaemin says quietly. “He was on holiday with his family, Xiamen’s a port city, near Taiwan. The kaiju he saw was Clawback. He enlisted in the academy years later. Then he met me.”

“So why do I have one of Renjun’s memories,” Donghyuck says. Nearly gently. It’s worse like that. Hesitation doesn’t seem like it should be in Donghyuck’s repertoire at all.

A taste in his mouth like iron. “I don’t know,” Jaemin says. The sound of it is hollowed out, even to his own ears.

Donghyuck shuts his eyes. The silence wraps around them like a cocoon, everything transforming itself underneath the cottony surface. All lit up by the unforgiving fluorescence overhead there’s no way Jaemin could ever mistake Donghyuck for anyone else.

Then Donghyuck speaks. “Jaeger tech, it’s new. Experimental. Nobody really knows what all that neural interfacing does to you, it hasn’t been around long enough for anyone to study the side effects or whatever.” He opens his eyes again. Looks right at Jaemin. “But the Drift, it's two people, yeah, but it's two people and a medium. That makes _three_, do you get what I’m saying?” 

“Yeah,” Jaemin says. Ice cold. Submerged type of feeling. Water seaming over the crown of his head, he knows how this part goes. “I do.”

So it’s an unforeseen symptom of ghost Drift. Leftover neurons misfiring, the way decapitated bodies still twitch, or less morbidly, a process like sleepwalking. Lights on, nobody home. The delay isn’t surprising; consciously absorbing the entirety of another life all at once would be total overload, no way a human brain could cope with that. There’s only the specific memories you catch onto during the Drift, the rest dumped into the subconscious for processing later. Usually through dreams. For months after his first few Drifts with Renjun, Jaemin’s dreams were a whirlwind mosaic of Renjun’s childhood memories, his mother’s petally cheek, the sound of his grandfather’s laugh, the bright beady eye of his first pet bird. Theoretically, they’d become Jaemin’s memories too and therefore transferable. Transitive properties or something, he doesn’t know. Nobody knows. 

In the grand scheme of things it’s only a minor setback. There are still hundreds of physically eligible candidates within the Sydney Shatterdome and Donghyuck seems hell-bent on making his way through every single one of them. It’s like speed dating, except replace romance with combat. Jaemin drops in on one of Donghyuck’s Kwoon Room compatibility test sessions, stands at the back of the crowd of curious onlookers near the exit with his arms crossed, watching Donghyuck dispatch opponent after opponent with an effortless, efficient flair verging on laziness. Six-one, six-nil, six-nil, six-two, six-one, the scores are tragic. None of them can keep up with Donghyuck. 

Donghyuck rests the end of his staff against the ground, breathing hard and flushed from exertion. Over the tops of everyone’s heads, his eyes meet Jaemin’s. Brief. Whole world narrowing, view through a pathfinder. It isn’t until Donghyuck looks away that Jaemin realises he’s been holding his breath. His palms itch. Three sets of the same sense memory feather over one another, smooth wooden staff in his hands, Renjun’s hands, Donghyuck’s hands. 

It should be him in the ring. His heart is a clenched fist, uneasing. Donghyuck doesn’t look at him again. Jaemin leaves the room. 

Donghyuck ambushes Jaemin in the doorway of his dorm. Materialises out of nowhere as Jaemin’s keying in his access code. “Spar with me,” Donghyuck demands. 

“Hello to you too,” Jaemin says. “Right now? _Here?_”

The tension shimmers off Donghyuck’s skin in almost palpable waves. “No, in the Sydney Opera House on New Year’s Eve. Yes, _here_.” 

“Not in the hallway,” Jaemin says firmly, pushing the door to his room open. “Inside.”

Donghyuck makes a terse, annoyed sound, but he’s the one asking Jaemin for a favour, and he steps over the threshold. Jaemin’s room is in no way designed to be the site of hand-to-hand combat, though it’s better than the corridor. He pushes the debris of everyday living off to the side, clears a space in the middle. He isn’t sure why he’s agreeing to this. Maybe it’s the Ghost Drift, the feeling mirroring itself between them. Maybe it’s something else. The expansion of his spaces to accommodate Donghyuck, a process he hadn’t even noticed. 

They warm up on opposite sides of the room, because Jaemin insists on it. Stretches, heartbeat ramped up gradually, neither of them can afford that kind of injury, Donghyuck least of all. This last point is bitter to admit, even just to himself, but it’s an objective truth. At this point in time, Donghyuck’s chances of getting in a jaeger significantly outweigh his own.

“How do you want to play?” Jaemin says, straightening up. Anyone who knew Renjun is by necessity no stranger to impromptu physical fights. He has done this before.

“I don’t care,” Donghyuck says.

“Alright,” Jaemin says. “Then anything goes.”

No Kwoon Room formalities here. Donghyuck strikes first. Jaemin doesn’t defend, just strikes back. Fist to the solar plexus, heel kick, thud of impact breaking against Donghyuck’s forearm. It’s good to fight without the added barrier of staves, knuckles on skin. Blood blooming up. Simplicity of motion. This language both of them understand. Donghyuck’s hand-to-hand is a gleeful hodgepodge of at least three different martial arts styles that Jaemin can recognise in the moment, efficient as always. Jaemin counters, blocks, gets his arm around Donghyuck’s neck.

Then Donghyuck says, remote, “It was so cold in the ocean,” and Jaemin falters, just long enough for Donghyuck to sweep his feet out from under him and pin him down. The memory flashes up, reversed. Mark on the ground. Renjun on the ground. Jaemin on the ground. The heel of Donghyuck’s palm digs into his windpipe. Red and white flickers behind Jaemin’s eyes.

“Low blow,” Jaemin grits out. 

“We agreed at the start,” Donghyuck says. Knee digging into the side of Jaemin’s ribs, it’s a hold Jaemin could break if he trusted Donghyuck was not genuinely trying to snap his neck. The sound of his breathing harsh and loud, at such close proximity. “Anything goes.”

Donghyuck was right. It had been so cold in the ocean. Jaemin doesn’t remember it but he keeps dreaming it, the shock of hitting the water, the completeness. He should have stayed at the bottom of the ocean, but here he is anyway, heartbeat so close to the surface, the pulse at Donghyuck’s wrist centimetres away from the pulse at Jaemin’s throat, both of them undeniably alive. This is the proof. 

He reaches up. Slow. Hand sliding over the back of Donghyuck’s neck. Donghyuck doesn't shift his palm away from the centre of Jaemin’s throat but he allows Jaemin to pull him in until their mouths slide together. Donghyuck’s lips are gentle, almost surprisingly so, before he bites down on Jaemin’s bottom lip, demanding. That’s more familiar. Jaemin parts his lips for Donghyuck’s tongue, and when Donghyuck’s hand falls away and the pressure on Jaemin’s throat subsides, Jaemin pushes himself upright for better leverage. Donghyuck just winds his hands into Jaemin’s hair and kisses him harder, mouth hot and wet and sweet. 

“Wait,” Jaemin says, pulling back. Donghyuck makes a bossy noise of displeasure. “Do you want me to be Mark?”

Donghyuck’s mouth falls open. “What the fuck,” he says.

“I’ve been in your _head,_” Jaemin says, exasperated. 

“And you never will be again,” Donghyuck snaps. “Do you want _me_ to be Mark?”

“Why the hell would I want you to be Mark?”

“I’ve been in _your_ head too, remember?” 

Of course that’s what Donghyuck gleaned from the Drift. Some offhand thought about Mark Lee’s inexplicable charm and not literally anything else of actual relevance. Jaemin leans back in, licks into Donghyuck’s mouth until the irritation is washed clean away by heat, the tug of Donghyuck’s fingers at his hair. He slides a hand under Donghyuck’s shirt, seeking out the skin underneath, smiling wide when Donghyuck breaks the kiss to pull his shirt over his head and impatiently gestures at Jaemin to do the same.

As soon as Jaemin’s fingers dip beneath Donghyuck’s waistband Donghyuck catches his wrist, says, “I am _not_ doing this on the floor when there is a bed literally right there.”

“Anything you like,” Jaemin says. He can’t stop staring at Donghyuck’s mouth, kiss-bruised. He reaches forward and puts a thumb to the shiny divot of Donghyuck’s lower lip and Donghyuck flushes, scrambling to his feet.

Jaemin stands up too. Pulse in his ears. Donghyuck places his hands on Jaemin’s shoulders, palms searing the bare skin, and steers him backwards. Step by step, Jaemin gives. His calves hit the bed and he lets Donghyuck push him down onto the mattress, because it’s what Donghyuck wants from him, and because it’s easier to tug Donghyuck down with him like this, too. 

Donghyuck crawls over Jaemin’s body, braces himself with a palm on either side of Jaemin’s head, eyes dark and glittering. “Knew you couldn’t wait to get your hands on me,” he says, the taunt a little undermined by its breathlessness.

“You’re very beautiful,” Jaemin says. Entirely serious. He watches Donghyuck’s eyes shutter, the dark furl of his lashes. 

Almost paradoxically he wants to be tender when his hands touch Donghyuck’s skin, though the fight from earlier is still singing in his blood. He puts his mouth to the moles on Donghyuck’s throat, one after the other, feels Donghyuck shudder above him. This time when he reaches for Donghyuck’s waistband Donghyuck doesn’t protest, kicks off his sweatpants, cants his hips down insistently against Jaemin’s palm. Head tipping back. Dip of his collarbones shining with sweat. 

It’s easy to manoeuvre them around so they’re facing one another, crammed side by side on the bed. Jaemin curls his fingers around Donghyuck’s cock, through his boxers, and Donghyuck swears, jerks forward, whole body pressed up against Jaemin. All of him warm, muscle working under skin. All of that beautifully contained tension. 

He sets his other hand to Donghyuck’s bare stomach, fingertips over lower ribs, Donghyuck’s heart pounding hard enough Jaemin can feel it there, too. Slides lower. Thumb smoothing over the crest of Donghyuck’s hip bone. He tugs Donghyuck’s boxers off his legs and shifts so Donghyuck’s back is to the mattress, Jaemin’s knees bracketing his hips. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed,” Donghyuck begins, but Jaemin just bends down to kiss the wild pulse fluttering at Donghyuck’s navel.

Lower. Jaemin licks a stripe up Donghyuck’s cock, heavy and flushed against his stomach, and Donghyuck whines, squirming against the pressure of Jaemin’s palms at his hips. When Jaemin goes to take Donghyuck into his mouth, Donghyuck grabs the back of his neck and says, “No.” 

Before Jaemin can process it Donghyuck’s hands move to Jaemin’s shoulders and flips them over again. The breath rushes out of Jaemin. Donghyuck clambers over him, knocking Jaemin’s knees apart to settle in the space between them. He makes short work of Jaemin’s pants and Jaemin flinches when Donghyuck’s breath ghosts over his aching cock, exposed to the air, fingers pressing into the tops of Jaemin’s thighs.

“Hey,” Jaemin manages. “What are you—”

Donghyuck wraps his hand around the base of Jaemin's cock and tongues at the head, before swallowing him down. The sight of Donghyuck's lips stretched around him has Jaemin's hands curling into the sheets, biting back a whimper as Donghyuck bobs his head along Jaemin's length, hollows his cheeks, twists his wrist. Then Donghyuck glances up at him through his lashes, gaze sly and liquid, and Jaemin can't stop himself from bucking forward into the heat of his mouth, helpless. 

“Fuck,” Jaemin gasps, fingers clutching helplessly at the soft strands of Donghyuck’s hair near the base of his skull, “fuck, Donghyuck—I’m gonna—”

Donghyuck pulls off with an obscene pop, swiping the back of his hand over his mouth, wet with saliva and precome. Such a careless gesture but it takes Jaemin an astronomical amount of self-control to stop himself from coming on the spot. Like he knows, Donghyuck grins at him, sharp and satisfied.

Jaemin only has lube in his nightstand, so they have to settle for grinding blindly and messily against each other like teenagers. A white hot ache fireworking from the base of Jaemin’s spine all the way up. Donghyuck lines their cocks up, does something with his clever fingers that makes Jaemin feel like he's going blind. Skin on skin, the slick slide sending his thoughts scattering like light through a prism. 

“Kiss me,” Donghyuck orders, so Jaemin obliges. He props himself upright to kiss Donghyuck again, and again, even though it keeps disintegrating into wet gasping, open-mouthed and incoherent. Reaches for Donghyuck's cock, torques his wrist, listens to the erratic stutter of Donghyuck’s breaths in response. Palm to the centre of Donghyuck's chest, over the breastbone, tipping Donghyuck backwards onto the mattress.

“Would it kill you,” Donghyuck pants, “to not have the upper hand for once—”

“Just let me take care of you,” Jaemin says, wheedles, lips on Donghyuck's throat, thumb flicking over the head of Donghyuck's cock. 

When Donghyuck comes it’s with a barely stifled noise, all of him going tense and pulling up off the sheets, spine bowing forward like an inverted bridge. In Jaemin’s bed, the breath stunned out of him, he looks like he’s made from gold. That moment of stillness before he shakes apart, and Jaemin wants all of it so badly. A love that sinks its teeth in. Cleaves right through to the bone. So big he can’t speak its name. Jaemin’s mind goes blank and then he’s coming too, spilling over Donghyuck’s fingers, heart shattering against his ribcage.

Then the terror sets in: what does it mean, to have this. What does he have, at all.

Jaemin stands first, retrieving towels from the bathroom to clean them both up. They get dressed again, barely looking at each other. Jaemin can feel the shared warmth of the moment receding, second by second, and he doesn’t know how to stop it. How to tell Donghyuck the space in the middle of his chest has gone clear and fragile like sugar glass. If he lets go first does it make it any better? Being the one with his eyes open? The one who turns to look back?

He says, neutral cool, “Why did you come here?” 

The line of Donghyuck’s shoulders goes stiff. “Oh, you know,” he says casually. “It was my first Drift simulation with Jeno in the morning, had some extra energy to burn.”

Jaemin’s heart drops to his feet like a meteorite. “You’re Drift compatible with _Jeno?_”

“Yeah, I am,” Donghyuck says, tilting his chin up. “We scored ten-all in the Kwoon Room. What, didn’t he tell you?”

Jeno did not tell Jaemin. Why didn’t Jeno tell him? Jaemin bites back the indignant hurt. Right now, Donghyuck is the last person on the planet he wants to bare that throat to. “Am I the last person in the entire fucking Shatterdome to find out?”

“What’s it to you?”

“It’s _Jeno_, of course it’s—what the fuck would you know, anyway—” 

“What would _I_ know? I’m the one who’s Drift compatible with him, I think that makes me the authority here.”

“Anyone can be Drift compatible,” Jaemin says. “Jeno is _my best friend_—” 

“You’re jealous,” Donghyuck says. Furious colour high in his cheeks. “You don’t want Jeno to pilot with me because you think you’re the only person allowed to have him. You can’t lie to me, I’ve been in your head—” 

“That doesn't mean you know anything about me,” Jaemin snaps. “You don’t know me.”

“I know enough,” Donghyuck hisses. “And guess fucking what! Jeno isn’t your copilot, he’s mine—” 

“I wouldn’t count on that,” Jaemin says sharply. The vulnerability is there, he has a weapon. He’s been in Donghyuck’s brain and knows exactly where to hit in order to make it hurt. Lose once, lose everything, Jaemin is so fucking sick of holding on. “_We_ were compatible and bombed it, don’t you think there’s a reason all your copilot matches keep falling through?”

Donghyuck reels back like he’s been struck. “Na Jaemin,” he says, all ice. The kind of metal-cold that leaches all the warmth from the air around it. “You are such a fucking coward.”

Silence, after the door slams shut. An almost total absence of sound and like an echo Jaemin feels the blow shake through him, blunt force trauma, more for what he knows it means than the reaction itself. He cares so much he needed to ruin it for himself. Too late now, to regret what he’d done. Donghyuck isn’t in his room anymore. For the first time in a while, Jaemin understands himself to be alone.

Around four in the afternoon, Jeno stands up. There’s an audible crackling noise that both of them wince at. Jeno’s office chair is top of the range in ergonomic support—Jaemin should know, because he’d bought it for him—but there are probably limits to how long anyone can stay seated without protest from the body. 

“Come on,” Jeno says. “Let’s get some fresh air.”

“You’re going to leave the Shatterdome for _me_?” Jaemin presses a hand to his chest. “Be still my fucking heart, I didn’t know you knew the outside world existed—” 

“Shut up,” Jeno grumbles. “Do you want to come or not?”

“Of course I do,” Jaemin coos. “I need to witness this special occasion!” 

Jeno kicks at his shin. Jaemin loops his arm through the crook of Jeno’s elbow. They don’t end up going too far out of the Shatterdome, sitting down on the pier at the edge of the water. Balmy weather, summer transitioning to autumn, slight chill starting to creep into the evenings. 

“So are you mad because I’m piloting with Donghyuck, or are you mad because I didn’t tell you first?” Jeno says bluntly.

Jaemin splutters at the unexpected directness. “I am not _mad_.”

Jeno looks doubtful. “You seem pretty mad.”

Lately whenever Jaemin spends time with Jeno he has to wrestle off the feeling of unwittingly participating in a timeshare agreement. Jaemin’s gone back to avoiding the Kwoon Room, except this time it’s not because external circumstances are conspiring against him—no, it’s still because external circumstances are conspiring against him. If he sees Donghyuck he’ll have to—he doesn’t know. So it’s a rational choice. Better for everyone involved if he figures everything out first. But thinking about it carries the congealed, gummy ache of a tooth coming in, not painful unless directly engaged. Okay, maybe there is some avoidance going on.

“I was just—surprised. I thought you didn’t want to pilot.” Or you would have piloted with me, Jaemin doesn’t say. Rise Falcon would have been you and me. 

“I didn’t think so either,” Jeno says. “But I guess even I’ve changed.” 

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was going to,” Jeno says. “I promise! Donghyuck just, um, got there first. By the way, what happened there? He won’t talk about it and our next Drift simulation isn’t for another week.”

Jaemin makes a face. “I said some things I didn’t mean,” he says. 

“Didn’t mean, or didn’t mean to say?”

“I’m not sure,” Jaemin mutters, feeling like a child. “I should apologise. Probably.”

Renjun had been a firm believer in the power of a long spar followed by a longer heart-to-heart with ambient candlelight; one way or another there would usually be tears. Or sometimes he’d bolt like a spooked horse and wouldn’t give an inch for days. Being copilots didn’t mean they never fought. Renjun had a contentious relationship at best with the invasive closeness engendered by the Drift, wanting that defense mechanism of self-sufficiency to ward off the fear of assimilation or being completely known to another person or whatever unarticulated terror he carried around, and they’d had to do a lot of silent compromising to make things work. 

Jaemin says, “Renjun would love Donghyuck. Or want to kill him. Or both.”

“Both,” Jeno agrees. “I think Rise Falcon has a soft spot for Donghyuck.”

“You believe in ghosts, right?”

Jeno shrugs. “Not like, actual ghosts. More like… energy. Lingering things.”

“Well,” Jaemin says. “Donghyuck did rebuild Rise Falcon.”

“Is it weird for you?” Jeno rests his cheek on his palm. “That I’m going to be piloting your old jaeger?”

“Jeno,” Jaemin says, entirely honestly, “there is quite possibly nobody I’d trust with Rise Falcon more than you.”

Jeno smiles. “Maybe she’ll remember me too. Or my voice, or something. Her old mission controller.”

“It’s good that she won’t have to be with strangers,” Jaemin says. A closed fist in his chest prying itself open, finger by finger. 

The water is so clear, underneath the wooden planks of the pier. Blue-green and sparkling. Jaemin can almost see all the way down to the shallow, sandy floor. 

“You like him, don’t you?” Jeno says.

“_Like_ is a very strong word, I wouldn’t throw it around so—” What is Jaemin even saying? Defeated, he switches track. “I don’t understand him. I’ve been inside his head, I’m still getting pieces of memory embedded in my dreams, and I don’t get him at all. But I still—I want to.”

“You just have to talk to him,” Jeno says. “With your words, like everyone else. Most people don’t get mindlinks with the person they like, you know.” 

“I’ve never had to talk before,” Jaemin mutters. Not with Renjun. Not even with Jeno. He prefers to conquer totally. Familiarity a matter of victory.

The sun shifts lower, stacking sheets of gold foil over the ocean. Every day they veer closer to the end of the world, but its limitless capacity for beauty as if it’ll last forever still manages to take him by surprise. 

“So learn,” Jeno says. 

“LUO ZAIMIN,” blasts his ears the second the video call connects. Jaemin winces, but he probably deserves it. The camera on the other end shakes, indistinct blur of colour, and Yiren’s forehead and brows come into focus, obscuring three quarters of the screen. 

“Hey,” Jaemin says weakly. “Hi. Uh. How are you guys?”

The frame shakes again, and when it refocuses the camera’s zoomed out far enough to show Xukun too, Yiren’s chin hooked over his shoulder. Impatiently, Yiren bats the nicety away. “We missed you so much,” she says, eyes shining wetly. “You have _no_ idea—” 

Thirty seconds in and Jaemin has already made Yiren cry. This call is going superbly. “I know it’s been a while,” he says, pretending not to notice the tears as a courtesy to Yiren. He hasn’t spoken in Mandarin for so long the tones jar, trip over his tongue. Everything sounds uncomfortably formal to his ears, the phrasing stilted. 

“Oh my god,” Yiren says. She’s smiling now, definitely a happy expression. “Oh my god, wait right there, let me go get Junhui and Zhengting, do _not_ hang up on us or I’m taking Obelisk Torment for a joyride to Sydney.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Jaemin promises. Heart already a little lighter, lessening in increments. 

Yiren disappears out of the frame, leaving Xukun alone on the line with Jaemin. They’d always both been closer to Renjun than one another, something uncomfortable about seeing too much of yourself reflected in somebody else that kept them firmly parked in the acquaintance zone. Jaemin just wasn’t the kind of person Xukun would ever confide in, or vice versa, which was fine. But Xukun’s looking at him carefully, mouth soft with concern, Jaemin now one of the myriad responsibilities Xukun always had a habit of taking up, not necessarily because he enjoyed it—as far as Jaemin could tell—but because it was something he felt he needed, or owed to himself, to do. 

Jaemin should not be anybody’s responsibility but his own. He adjusts his grip on his phone. “I saw on the news you made a full recovery after Scrapgun?” he says carefully.

“We did,” Xukun says. “You too, right? We were worried, we didn’t hear anything about you but we thought someone would have told us if anything’d happened…”

“Yeah,” Jaemin says. “I’m all good now. Sorry I—took so long to call.”

“I get it,” Xukun says, shrugging. Awkward but genuine. Jaemin’s almost pathetically grateful for it. “You needed time. I can’t even imagine what it was like.”

"_Nana,_” trills a voice offscreen, and Xukun glances to the side. There’s another disorienting blur as Xukun’s phone changes hands, and then it’s Zhengting and Junhui beaming at him, faces filling up the frame.

“No sheetmask tonight, Zhengting-ge?” Jaemin asks. Renjun never bothered with honorifics in Mandarin, but it was hard for Jaemin to adjust to the lack of them, and neither Zhengting nor Junhui minded.

Zhengting laughs. “Just finished up with it,” he says, patting his cheeks gently. “This is the hydrated glow of a perfect skincare routine.” 

“I bulk-bought a two-hundred-pack last week,” Junhui says. “I’ve been paying for everything in sheetmasks, really revolutionised the Shatterdome barter economy!”

It’s good to catch up, a year’s worth of mundane goings-on that he’s missed, Shatterdome gossip, the harmless everyday details of other people’s lives. Yangyang’s transferring to Los Angeles, Xu Minghao and Lee Seokmin of Utopia Ray are transferring _from_ Los Angeles, Kun either has a secret cat or a secret boyfriend (_or both!_ Junhui opines), Suyeon’s been promoted to Chief LOCCENT Officer. 

A lull in the conversation. “Ge,” Jaemin says. “Hypothetically speaking, if you fucked up—” 

“I do appreciate that you included the _hypothetically_, because Zhu Zhengting would never—” 

“Shh,” Junhui says, smacking Zhengting on the arm. “It’s Nana time!” 

Jaemin swallows a laugh, then sobers. “If you fucked up pretty bad, as in, you don’t know if you can even apologise for it. Or if you want to apologise for it. What do you do.”

“You Leos are so annoying,” Zhengting sighs. _Hey!_ comes Xukun’s protesting voice from somewhere offscreen. “Apologising really isn’t the end of the world, the kaiju have that covered just fine.”

“It’s not worth having any regrets,” Junhui adds. “Not when any day might be the last. That’s what I think, anyway.”

“I’m glad you came to us, though,” Zhengting says. Gaze keen and serious. That unreal warmheartedness running like a current between him and Junhui, impossible to determine which of them it originated from, or if it was something they shared even before the Drift. “This is why you called, right? I know you don’t like it. You want to be the one in control. See, I always say they shouldn’t let kids get into jaegers so young, you think everything is on you alone. But even piloting is a two-person job, Jaemin.” 

“_You’re_ so young, though?” Jaemin says.

“Thank you, you are my favourite,” Zhengting says. Jaemin’s smile slips, but he recovers, and neither Zhengting nor Junhui call him out on it. “But I meant what I said. Just apologise. It’s going to work out.”

“I’m happy you called too,” Junhui says. He smiles, bright blocky flash of teeth. “We missed you, we really did. All of us.”

Thank you. I missed you. The words lodge in his throat, won’t come out. Zhengting’s expression softens, perceptive as always. He gestures offscreen, and Yiren and Xukun’s faces pop into view. One more memory Jaemin can keep for himself. Familiarity holding steady.

“Keep in touch,” Zhengting sings. He flutters his fingers at Jaemin in a goodbye wave, and then the screen clicks off. 

So Jaemin swallows his pride and finds his way to Donghyuck’s dorm room in the morning. It’s almost comical how quickly Donghyuck’s face darkens when he opens the door and registers Jaemin’s presence, but Jaemin speaks first. “Can I talk to you?”

“I don’t know, can you?” Donghyuck parrots. 

“... Can I?”

Donghyuck’s expression gives nothing away. His fingers still on the handle like he’s going to slam the door in Jaemin’s face; Jaemin braces himself for the blow. But it doesn’t come. Instead, Donghyuck steps out of his room, and the door clicks shut gently behind him. Both of them standing in the hallway now, even ground. No barrier to direct gaze.

“Buy me a coffee,” Donghyuck says. “Then you can talk to me.”

It's an opening. Jaemin takes it.

As they pass the row of takeaway restaurants just outside the Shatterdome gates Donghyuck says, “One sec.” He ducks into one of the shops and reemerges a minute later, carrying a brown paper bag already going translucent with grease or condensation. He drops it into Jaemin’s hands. Jaemin blinks, delicately unrolls the top of the bag. Inside there’s a bun, Shanghai-style jian bao, sprinkled with sesame seeds, golden on the base. 

“... Thanks,” Jaemin says, thrown. Even in this, the apologising, it looks like Donghyuck is already a step ahead of him.

Donghyuck shrugs. “I owed you one,” he says. “Now we’re even.”

“That was… so long ago,” Jaemin says. “I didn’t know you were paying attention.”

“Well, I was,” Donghyuck says. There’s a brief pause, before he continues. “I didn’t tell you before but I saw your memory of meeting me and Rise Falcon in the hangar, during the Drift.” He stops again. “I didn’t realise. That you felt like that.”

“Oh. Right,” Jaemin says, then suppresses a flinch at the awkwardness of the delivery. “I don’t—it’s not like you could have known. I wasn’t really fair to you.” He takes a breath. Tries to let every ounce of genuineness in his body show. “I’m sorry. About everything. What I said to you about your copilots, it isn’t true. I know you and Jeno are going to work out, and I’m glad.”

Right from the start Jeno had his heart set on J-Tech, but nobody had been able to match his compatibility scores with Jaemin, until Renjun arrived and everything fell into place and everyone got what they wanted. It was even better like that, in a way: when it came down to it Renjun insisted on scrupulous divisions of selfhood, hoarding his independence like a crow collecting little bright trinkets, so even if he had Jaemin’s memories they were still _Jaemin’s_ and decisively not his own. Jaemin wouldn’t have minded either way, but the compartmentalisation was like a safety net, too. In the Drift Renjun had said as much, though as always unwilling to vocalise any doubt aloud—careful maintenance of individual pride aside, it would make for a cleaner break, in the worst case scenario.

If Jaemin and Jeno had been copilots they almost certainly would have gone down the one-person-two-bodies path like a lot of the older Rangers, unconscious slip into _we_ over _I,_ greenstick fracture of the worst kind if they ever had to separate themselves out again. Maybe it’d never heal right. So it’s a good thing they won't ever have to encounter that problem.

Donghyuck says, “You really were kind of an asshole. But…” His mouth compresses, then relaxes. “So was I. So like I said: now we’re even.”

The pan-fried base gives way underneath his molars with a crunch. The soup inside the bun is so hot it sears his tongue. Taste is as good as the Shatterdome’s. Or really it’s not a matter of comparison at all, apples to oranges, steamed to fried, just different. 

Jaemin licks the oil off his lips. He says, “Not yet. I owe you a coffee, don’t I?”

Donghyuck picks a café near the harbour, probably for the inflated prices. An iced Americano for Jaemin, an iced latte for Donghyuck, who immediately dumps a packet of raw sugar into his drink upon receiving it and stirs the crystals in with his straw. “How bitter is that even?” Donghyuck asks, eyeing Jaemin’s black coffee. 

“You can try it if you want,” Jaemin offers, sliding his cup across the table.

Like most other people in Jaemin’s life, Donghyuck is terminally incapable of backing down from a challenge. Donghyuck pinches his nose shut between forefinger and thumb, and gulps down a mouthful of Jaemin’s Americano, immediately followed by several mouthfuls of his own drink, like a chaser.

“I can literally feel that burning a hole in my stomach lining right now,” Donghyuck says, pushing the cup back towards Jaemin. “You drink this every day? Are you human?”

“You’ve Drifted with me,” Jaemin says. “You tell me.”

“I like coffee,” Donghyuck says, and Jaemin files this piece of information away, helpless habit, he likes to keep track of little details about the people he cares about, “but, like, normal coffee. With reasonable amounts of milk and sugar.”

“I don’t like dairy,” Jaemin says.

Donghyuck screws his face up. “Seriously?” A blankness flashes up behind his eyes, the telltale look of a Ranger plucking out a memory from an old Drift. “You live a deprived life. But I’ll remember that. At least the coffee here is good. One of the maybe three-and-a-half things I don’t miss about Korea.”

Jaemin hums. “What do you miss the most?”

“The rice,” Donghyuck says fervently. “It’s so fucking _mediocre_ here. I, like, legitimately have dreams of the rice I took for granted every day. If I transfer back to Busan in the middle of the night you’ll know why.”

“Right? And the Marshall even makes sure the Shatterdome gets the imported stuff, so there’s no reason why the rice should taste this bad. Have you noticed even the exact same brands of food taste weird here?” 

“Ugh,” Donghyuck groans. “I bought a family pack of Paldo King Cup Noodle ‘cause I saw it on special and it tastes like _nothing_, I swear it’s the water or something. Sucks the flavour right out, like a vampire. Thank you, Australia!” He slides a sideways glance at Jaemin. “... Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Like what?” Jaemin asks, feeling the grin on his face widen. Donghyuck’s cheeks dust with pink, but he rallies.

“I mean, I’m not complaining,” Donghyuck says. “Just remember to blink every now and again or people will get suspicious.”

That’s when it hits him. This is his life. Sun on the back of his neck, a pressure like the warmth of a cupped hand. Coffee cool and smooth on his tongue. Placid ocean at arm’s reach, and even closer than that, the pilot-turned-engineer-turned-pilot who brought Rise Falcon back into his life. He hadn’t known he would have any of this. Such a delight to be proven wrong, just this once. Such a delight to sit here in the sunlight talking about simple things with Donghyuck.

He’s expecting the guilt, when it comes, slow rise like relay gel. It always comes. “Renjun’s never been to Australia,” Jaemin says quietly. 

“But Rise Falcon has,” Donghyuck says.

“Yes,” Jaemin says. “Do you think—” He breaks off. “I don’t believe in ghosts. Renjun did, I don’t. But I believe in memory. It’s just that—if I forget, then it’s gone forever.”

“That’s not true.” Donghyuck shades his eyes, looking out over the ocean, flat and lovely as a mirror. When he turns back to Jaemin it’s like all that reflected light got caught in his eyes. “You have me, now,” he says. “I remember too.”

When Jaemin opens his eyes he’s in his old copilot quarters back at the Shanghai Shatterdome, perched on the edge of the bunk, which is how he knows he’s dreaming. Within his field of sight everything is unchanged—dark floorboards, non-regulation overstuffed armchair, doorframe flecked with ivory paint from a semi-successful interior redesign attempt—but the memory is imperfect, anyway; it would be beyond him to figure out any finer points of difference, if there were any there.

The mattress dips under someone else’s weight. A hand slips into his. 

“Hey,” Jaemin says quietly. He doesn’t turn to look.

“Hi,” says the boy sitting next to him, a shadowy blur on the periphery of his vision. “That’s my shirt you’re wearing.”

“Actually,” Jaemin says, “I think you’ll find it was _my_ shirt first. Before you absorbed my wardrobe.”

“What’s yours is mine,” the boy agrees serenely. “And what’s mine is mine.”

Jaemin bites back a helpless smile, staring down at his knees. “I kept all your things,” he says. 

“You’ve always been so sentimental,” the boy says. 

“Aren’t you projecting?”

He laughs. “You fight like me now, did you realise? Bold of you to be stealing my moves like that.”

“Really?” Jaemin says. He runs a thumb over the back of the boy’s hand, the jut of the knuckles there familiar as his own. “I didn’t realise. But imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?”

The boy huffs. “Guess I can let you off just this once.”

There are a thousand things Jaemin needs to tell him. None of them make it past his throat. The memory of the Drift sings between them like a live wire, a lost limb. 

Jaemin says, “I might be in love.”

The words hang shivering in the air for a moment. Breath condensing on a window. 

There’s a hum. “That’s good, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Are you happy?”

“I—” Jaemin stops. “I—am happy, I think.”

“Then that’s all I wanted.”

Jaemin exhales carefully. If it’s a little uneven, neither of them point it out. “I miss you,” he says. The feeling scrapes up the inside of his chest, a tenderness there like pressing down on an old bruise. The slow, sweet ache of blood rising to the surface.

He closes his eyes. Renjun’s voice, when it comes, filters hazily down to his ears, as if heard through water. 

“I’m right here,” Renjun says. The smile in his voice tastes like iron. A mouthful of blood. Three metres of ocean above their heads. He squeezes Jaemin’s fingers, brief, and then he lets go. 

Jaemin crashes into consciousness with the blare of kaiju alert sirens. Before he’s fully alert or in control of his faculties he’s already half-dressed, and then the grip of instinct loosens and his fingers pause on the laces of a boot. He isn’t a pilot. There is no jaeger waiting for him in the hangar. His pulse trills in his ears. He finishes tying the knot and straightens up and heads for LOCCENT Mission Control instead of the Drivesuit Room, as he has every time the Breach spits out a kaiju into their assigned slice of the Pacific Ocean. The difference this time is that Jeno won’t be there, because Jeno will be getting his drivesuit fitted to him, rigged up to the Conn-Pod, right side, mirroring Donghyuck. Lines of relay gel rising inside the helmets. Pons clicking into place. 

He makes it to LOCCENT just in time for the strike force drop, Rise Falcon and Tyrant Archfiend suspended over the ocean around the Gold Coast by two octuplet sets of Jumphawks, lowering them into the water. Technically he doesn’t have the clearance to be in here, but nobody’s ever been game enough to kick him out. 

Hyunjoon’s there too, shadowing another Drift technician. “Category V, codename Kobold,” he says, before Jaemin can ask. They’re on the same wavelength. Sometimes it’s nice, especially when they're complaining about the same thing. Hyunjoon has a real talent for sounding loftily disgruntled. “Who the fuck comes up with these names?”

“I’d love to be the guy in K-Science getting paid to random number generate threatening-sounding consonants and vowels together,” Jaemin says.

“Exciting job description,” Hyunjoon says. “Goodbye LOCCENT, goodbye active duty, hello throwing darts at a keyboard.”

“Probably a little less analog,” Jaemin says. “I bet they have, like, AI models going, just churning out kaiju names. Maybe the job is actually just quality control. You know, picking out the names with that special kaiju quality.”

Hyunjoon cracks a smile. On the screens, the jaegers execute a perfect intercept, Tyrant Archfiend from the front and Rise Falcon from behind, pincer formation. LOCCENT’s eyes are limited to whatever’s caught by the cameras built into the jaegers and a digital GPS tracking display; Jaemin’s used to filtering through the jumble of visual feedback to piece together movement, but he’s never seen Rise Falcon in action from the outside before. That sense of dislocation. Layers and layers of glass. Jeno and Donghyuck ensconced in the very heart of Jaemin’s former jaeger.

_“I swear these guys are getting uglier and uglier,”_ comes Donghyuck’s voice, conversational, over the comms. 

_“You got that right,”_ laughs Serim, as Tyrant Archfiend socks Kobold right in the gut. Furious, it rears back, right into Rise Falcon’s grappling distance. Electric blue spurts out from a gash down Kobold’s belly, before a burst of flame from Tyrant Archfiend’s knuckles cauterises the wound. 

_“Aim for the neck,”_ calls Sihyeon. Rise Falcon swipes at Kobold’s throat, but the kaiju ducks, wriggles away. An exclamation of frustration, unmistakeably Jeno. Tyrant Archfiend locks its arms around Kobold from behind, holds it in place as Rise Falcon wades back through the water.

Kobold stops trying to shake Tyrant Archfiend off. It—curls forward, and before anyone can voice their confusion at this counterintuitive movement its back sprouts a dense, bristling array of copper-blue jagged spikes that punch right through Tyrant Archfiend’s front.

The entirety of LOCCENT is stunned into silence. Then every system alert goes off at the same time. Hull integrity breached. Conn-Pod breached. Lower body hydraulics compromised. The messages flash up onscreen almost too fast for Jaemin’s eyes to track. Kobold throws Tyrant Archfiend off and Jaemin sucks in a breath at the damage, corrosive blue eating holes through the armour. The jaeger sways a little. Then her legs give way.

At the main station, Yerim swears. “Tyrant Archfiend,” she calls out, into the comms. “Do you copy?” Nothing. Crackling static. “Tyrant Archfiend, do you copy?”

Tyrant Archfiend down. Along with every person in the room Jaemin strains his vision for the familiar escape pod capsule on the periphery of Rise Falcon’s vision, and there’s a collective ripple of tension released when it breaks the waves and blinks into digital being on the GPS display with two steady sets of vitals registered inside. Serim and Sihyeon will be safe. The PPDC engineers can work miracles; they’d resurrected Rise Falcon, and Tyrant Archfiend even has the advantage of still being primarily in one piece.

_“Acid-covered spikes?”_ Jeno’s voice is strained with exertion. _“That’s new, isn’t it?”_

_“Like that animal. That Australian one.”_ Donghyuck sounds either disgusted or delighted. _“Echidna! Thanks, Jeno.” _

Drift meshing them together. What Jeno knows Donghyuck also knows; Jaemin’d nearly forgotten. Rise Falcon is noticeably more wary about engaging in close combat now, circling around Kobold. As if in trade-off Kobold’s fighting even nastier. Ring of spines braceleting a misshapen wrist, dripping kaiju blue. Targeting Rise Falcon’s elbows, knees, weakness of joints. 

_“Fuck it, let’s finish this,”_ Donghyuck says. Rise Falcon goes all in. It must take Kobold by surprise, direct clash of metal against flesh. But as soon as the spikes engage the tide starts turning. Terse silence through LOCCENT, watching Kobold swipe at Rise Falcon, dig its claws into her shoulders from behind. It’s mirroring the hold Tyrant Archfiend tried to execute on it, Jaemin realises. Stone in his stomach. Any moment Kobold’s spikes will come out, lance through Rise Falcon’s torso where Jeno and Donghyuck— 

A sword explodes out from Rise Falcon’s elbow, a crackling lance of plasma. Shears right through Kobold’s shoulder, neon blue spew and Kobold loses its balance without the counterweight, footing sliding out from underneath it just long enough for Rise Falcon to punch her other fist right through its chest. Slow motion, cinematic. Jaemin’s seeing it frame by frame, so much empty space between each flash of movement, white and blue and red smearing out like overexposed afterimages. Kobold crashes into the water. Twitches once. Doesn’t move again.

Cheering erupts, roar like blood in Jaemin’s ears. The kaiju signature on the screen gutters out. Everyone safe. Everyone alive. Drift technicians slumping back in their seats, another event contained, controlled. The blur of Jumphawk rotors like insect wings approach in the edges of Rise Falcon’s vision to bring her back to base. 

Jaemin stands up. His legs shake, then steady themselves. He turns around and sprints out of the control centre, feet aligning themselves towards the highest point of the Shatterdome.

He’s the first person into the hangar to greet Rise Falcon as she limps home, victorious. One moment of stillness where it’s just him looking up at Falcon coming to a rest, before the technicians flood in around him. Two figures in drivesuits emerge from the Conn-Pod like moths out of a chrysalis, dark against the glassy amber of Rise Falcon’s core, and relief comes down tidal. He only gets that glimpse before Jeno and Donghyuck are whisked away to decontamination, but it’s enough. His heart’s turning itself inside-out, faceted like crystal. 

It takes him a while to figure out how to navigate his way down to the decontamination facilities from the hangar. Jaemin’s never had reason to visit the ones in the Sydney Shatterdome before. He doesn’t even bother trying with his ID; there’s no way he has the clearance to enter. He just has to wait.

Donghyuck comes out of the doors first, divested of his drivesuit. Unscathed, unharmed. He walks right into Jaemin’s arms. His dogtags press into Jaemin’s chest and all Jaemin can do is hold him, wordless with something fierce and tender and close to elation. 

“You’re alive,” Jaemin says stupidly. He draws back.

“I am,” Donghyuck says. He shakes his head. Awful posture, he has to look up at Jaemin. “Listen, listen, the sword, at the end.” His breath comes in fits and starts, still hopped up on adrenalin, synapses sparking overtime. “It wasn’t me or Jeno. It saved our lives, but it wasn’t—neither of us deployed it. It just—by itself. Or... not by itself.”

He stops short of saying it aloud. His eyes are electric. Jaemin wants to put a hand to Donghyuck’s cheek, kiss him, swallow him whole, watch him forge himself into something better and brighter. He is so alive it hurts to look at him. Jaemin won’t look away, not now, not ever. 

Thank you, Jaemin thinks, dizzy with it. Unsure of who or what exactly he’s directing that gratitude towards but it wells up, helpless. Somewhere high above them, in the hangar, Rise Falcon keeps her secrets.

Some days he’ll be brushing his teeth or unloading the washing and he’ll realise the tenor of Renjun’s laugh has gone insubstantial as water vapour and it scares him so much he has to spend the next few hours sifting through old videos, TV interviews, self-cameras they filmed fucking around on each other’s phones, promotional footage, condensing the memory into surety again. Everything spills out of his fingers. But love is memory is love, and Donghyuck always finds him as though he knows exactly what’s in Jaemin’s head and puts his arms around him until the fear settles. 

“I won’t forget,” Jaemin mumbles. “I can’t forget. I could never—” and Donghyuck grips his shoulders, looks him right in the eye, that deadly bright certainty, and says, “You _won’t_.”

Donghyuck and Jeno mirror each other, more often than not, little movements like the tilt of a head or the stretch of an arm in perfect sync. Drift hangover, boundaries of the self going blurry around the edges, Jaemin’s lived it too. It’s eerie being on the outside of it now. It used to be so easy. But Jaemin’s never wanted _easy._ He learns Donghyuck in other ways, fingers stepladdering up his ribs, the soft insides of his thighs, the curve of his jaw. What he looks like lit up with fight in the Kwoon Room or lax in sleep. _Here are all the places in you that are unknown to me. I want everything that I am not, because I am not you. _

Jaemin is on closing duty for the hangar tonight. He’s started running engineering work, because the roles Jeno and Donghyuck used to occupy haven’t been replaced yet, new technicians still in the administrative process of transferring in from overseas Shatterdomes. And it’s good to fill his days with something active. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever pilot again, but he’s growing back into the habit of being the only person in his head. It doesn’t have to be lonely, like this.

He finishes up with Tyrant Archfiend, newly restored to whole and pristine glory, and walks over to the last and most familiar occupant of the Sydney Shatterdome. He looks up, and up, and up, Rise Falcon at rest with her head nearly reaching the ceiling of the hangar, not the Falcon he’d flown but the memory’s there, and reciprocated. She remembers him, just as surely as he remembers her. And she remembers Renjun, and Jeno, and Donghyuck, and maybe the word for it isn’t _remember_ at all.

She is beautiful. Still. All that potential for violence or rescue or one in the pursuit of the other contained, for the moment. If he set a hand to the metal of her shin he’d hardly be surprised to find it warm, as though alive. As though lit up from the inside, the invisible corona of a candle flame, like a sheath, or a shield. 

Jaemin grasps the handle that operates the floodlights and pulls it down. One by one the lights overhead clank off. He turns around, pauses at the threshold of the room, the jaeger that used to be his at his back. He touches the metal edge of the doorway. Then he steps out of the hangar and into the light.

**Author's Note:**

> additional content warnings: past character death, grief/mourning processes
> 
> incidentally the jaegers were all named after yugioh monsters and the kaiju names were generated via neural network
> 
> please let me know what you thought in the comments!! you can find me on twitter [@juncheolsoo](https://twitter.com/juncheolsoo) and on cc [@inheritance](https://curiouscat.me/inheritance) ♡


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